4 Groups of People Conservative "Compassion" Is Hurting

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/4-groups-people-conservative-compassion-hurting

1) Immigrant children. When the surge of children fleeing violence in Central America by escaping to the United States first started to garner national attention, right wing reaction was extremely ugly, with politicians accusing the migrants of spreading disease and being rapists. This, understandably, caused many people to wonder what the hell is wrong with them that they would speak of traumatized children this way, so now some of the worst offenders are trying a different tactic: Trying to argue that they want to send the kids back home post-haste out of compassion.

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2) Women who want abortions. One in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime, and after nearly four decades of accusing these women of murder, the anti-choice movement has finally wised up to how ineffective that strategy really is. So now the game plan is pretending that abortion needs to be banned to protect women from those evil abortion doctors, who are assumed to be tricking women somehow into getting abortions.

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3) Poor people. Decades of evidence shows that the best way to help relieve poverty is to give poor people money and health care, full stop. The best programs for relieving poverty are Social Security, EITC, and SNAP, not just in the short term, but in the long term, where they are associated with higher rates of employment and higher earnings for children who get this assistance when they become adults. Medicaid is associated with lifelong health benefits for children whose mothers had it during pregnancy.

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4) The uninsured. While the Affordable Care Act was a wide-ranging bill that beefed up the rights of people who are already insured, what really teed Republicans off were the parts of the bill that were geared towards getting insurance to currently uninsured people, such as the Medicaid expansion, health care subsidies, and the creation of insurance exchanges to help uninsured people buy insurance. But while you’ll occasionally see conservatives show their true face as they celebrate the possibility of cutting the newly insured from the rolls, the official line the right is taking is that they’re trying to help the uninsured.