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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIn rural Kentucky, health-care debate takes back seat as the long-uninsured line up
A poignant story from Kentucky on ACA. Hello, Sen. McConnell? These are YOUR constituents.
http://wapo.st/1ceY1fM
6:04 AM - 24 Nov 2013
In?BREATHITT COUNTY, Ky. On the campaign trail, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was still blasting the new health-care law as unsalvageable. At the White House, President Obama was still apologizing for the botched federal Web site.
But in a state where the rollout has gone smoothly, and in a county that is one of the poorest and unhealthiest in the country, Courtney Lively has been busy signing people up: cashiers from the IGA grocery, clerks from the dollar store, workers from the lock factory, call-center agents, laid-off coal miners, KFC cooks, Chinese green-card holders in town to teach Appalachian students.
Now it was the beginning of another day, and a man Lively would list as Client 375 sat across from her in her office at a health clinic next to a Hardees.
So, is that Breathitt County? she asked Woodrow Wilson Noble as she tapped his information into a laptop Thursday morning.
Yeah, we live on this side of the hill, said Noble, whose family farm had gone under, who lived on food stamps and what his mother could spare, and who was about to hear whether he would have health insurance for the first time in his 60-year-old life.
This is how things are going in Kentucky: As conservatives argued that the new health-care law will wreck the economy, as liberals argued it will save billions, as many Americans raged at losing old health plans and some analysts warned that a disproportionate influx of the sick and the poor could wreck the new health-care model, Lively was telling Noble something he did not expect to hear.
More at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-rural-kentucky-health-care-debate-takes-back-seat-as-people-sign-up-for-insurance/2013/11/23/449dc6e0-5465-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html
http://theobamadiary.com/
NYC_SKP
(68,644 posts)K/R
maxsolomon
(33,345 posts)They have as little empathy for them as they do for the african-american urban poor.
I've spent enough time in rural Appalachia to say I'm acquainted with rural poverty, as well as in inner-city Cincinnati to say I'm acquainted with urban poverty. These folks have no bootstraps. There are no bootstraps to be had in Appalachia. If they have ambition, they learn Readin', Writin', Route 23, as Dwight Yoakum sings, and get out. At least they used to before America's industrial heart was shipped to China.
As an Atheist, let me say that these are the people Jesus wanted us to care for.
TheKentuckian
(25,026 posts)They despise do them like they do inner city minorities but are forced by math to give them lip service to keep those votes and keep those voters convinced that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires due to some godless Washington eggheads keep looting the country for the benefit of blacks and Hispanics in the big city while they would be left to starve was it not for their own grit and ingenuity.
maxsolomon
(33,345 posts)Republicans all (except myself and my siblings), do not have Appalachians in our Irish/German family. Maybe in Kentucky suburbanites have country cousins, but I'm speaking of the majority of suburban GOP voters.
You're right that they despise Appalachians - but to a slightly lesser degree than urban blacks. And they don't really know any - maybe they buy gas from them on the way to tool around Lake Cumberland or something, but they don't KNOW their circumstances enough to have empathy.