Whites in the South are the most anti-black group in America; a lot more whites in the South are now Republicans than were at the beginning of the 1990s.
What this all adds up to is that both of these statements can be true at the same time:
1) Many of Obama’s opponents harbor a significant amount of racial resentment against black people.2) To quote Bill Clinton: “100% of those who are opposing him now would be against him if he were a white Democrat.”
Opposition to Obama is tied up with race because party identification in America is tied up with race. Are there some racist idiots at many of the GOP rallies? Yes. Would there be sexist idiots if Hillary Clinton were president? Also yes. Would any Democratic president be able to reform the entire health-care system — or undertake any major government-growing reform — without significant opposition from roughly the same group of people who are out protesting today? Absolutely not.
As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.
Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.
Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.
. . . men and women aren't treated equally, aren't seen as equals, aren't valued in the same ways in the same spaces. And yes, men shouldn't be reduced to muscular arms and flat, tan stomachs and shouldn't begin to enter the world of debasement women have been living in for such a long time, that reaching equality at the lowest common denominator is no way to reach equality. [But] men - white men, I should specify - are still generally seen first and foremost as people. Therefore, being reduced to an object is still a terrible thing, but its cultural impact is not the same if the same image is with a woman. Because, as much as I wish all things were equal, women are still primarily seen as bodies first. [my emphasis]
We may just have a culture in which people who care about health-care coverage don't think about becoming entrepreneurs, as they know perfectly well that they can't sacrifice the safety provided by a large employer. You've heard of learned helplessness? This is learned corporatism. A culture in which people didn't worry about health-care costs might also be a culture in which they were more willing to consider occupational risks.
So will health-care reform fix this? It will help. The various health-care plans under consideration all make life better for a would-be entrepreneur who wants to buy health insurance. The subsidies will help him afford coverage. The regulations will make sure insurers can't deny his family outright our jack up their rates. The exchanges will give him purchasing power and choice.
9/23/09
Andrew,
I'm not sure you should take the results of this survey at face value (as you seemed to here). The sample size for the poll is 621, and the margin of error is +/- 3.9%. But only 35% of the respondents are Republican. That means that the margin of error for this subgroup is closer to +/- 6.65%. The pollster also notes that "other factors, such as refusal to be interviewed and weighting, may introduce additional error that is more difficult to quantify."
If you look at some of the other cross-tabulations, they're very difficult to believe. For example, according the poll, 22% those between the ages of 18 and 29 believe President Obama is the Anti-Christ. This compared to only 5% of those age 30 to 45; 9% of those age 46 to 65; and 7% of those over the age of 65.
Since when are younger people more predisposed to believe President Obama is the Anti-Christ? This contradicts every polling trend we've seen.
Anyway, I just think it's worth mentioning that conspiratorial thinking may not be as prevalent among Republicans as this poll leads us to believe.
Best,
Jeremy Biggs
By now, a Michael Moore film is its own genre: a vigorous vaudeville of working-class sob stories, snippets of right-wing power players saying ugly things, longer interviews with experts on the Left, funny old film clips and, at the climax, Moore engaging in some form of populist grandstanding.
When critics blamed pro-life partisans for the death of George Tiller, there at least was a coherent connection between the pundits' anti-abortion rhetoric and the assassin's target. Say what you will about Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but neither is known for railing against the Holocaust museum. If Beck, to borrow Rich's mixed metaphor, is cheering on a kettle, it isn't the kettle that produced James von Brunn.
We've heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we're sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we've heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers' anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world.
When such a story is directed at those who oppose the politicians in power, it has an additional effect. The list of dangerous forces that need to be marginalized inevitably expands to include peaceful, legitimate critics.
These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation. For example, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism governing Medicare’s payments to physicians has frequently been modified (either through legislation or administrative action) to avoid reductions in those payments. The projected savings for the Chairman’s proposal reflect the cumulative impact of a number of specifications that would constrain payment rates for providers of Medicare services. The long-term budgetary impact could be quite different if those provisions were ultimately changed or not fully implemented. (If those changes arose from future legislation, CBO would estimate their costs when that legislation was being considered by the Congress.)
[T]he plan would reduce the deficit if it were carried out as written, but there is good reason based on historical experience to be skeptical that it would be.
Let me try to put CBO's point in a more familiar setting: Your friend Joe, who says he want to lose weight, asks you for an extra slice of pie after dinner. Naturally, you are doubtful about the wisdom of the request. "Ahem, Joe," you whisper, "Aren't there a lot of calories in that?"
"Yes," he says, "but the pie is part of a larger plan. I am committed not only to eating that slice of pie but also to going to the gym every day for the next week and spending at least half a hour on the treadmill. That exercise will more than work off those extra calories."
"But that's what you said last week, when you asked for piece of cake. And you didn't end up going to the gym."
"Yes, I know" he replies ruefully, "but this time I really mean it . . . . Can you please pass the pie?"
In short, it is not only not true that "no one" believes that this will cost more than Medicare Part D, it's not really very reasonable for anyone to disbelieve it. We are, after all, preparing to provide health care for millions of more people, who will not only be consuming prescription drugs, but also heart catheterization and asthma treatment and the leg amputations that doctors apparently prefer to providing routine diabetes care. Prescription drug costs are on the order of 10% of overall spending, even for Medicare.
If any of the cuts or the taxes fails, the deficit starts bigger, and gets bigger faster. Meanwhile, Obama has moved forward one of the really expensive bits, covering people who are uninsurable because they have some expensive disease.
How are we paying for this? Dunno. It's all too vague. But to my ears, Obama has so far failed to rule out anything expensive, like generous subsidies, and also failed to outline who he's going to tax or cut benefits to if he's serious about deficit neutrality. So a mere stated wish to stay deficit neutral just won't do--every president states that sort of wish. The question is, what will they do to get there? Obama's coyness on this topic is reaching it's sell by date. It's time for the president to commit to an actual plan with actual numbers we can check.
2) The House bill would allow abortions to be covered under the public plan. The president keeps insisting that this isn't true. He's either fudging or he's genuinely ignorant.
3) It's at best misleading for the president to insist that everyone who is currently covered will be able to 'keep what they have.' The truth is much more complicated and uncertain.
4) As one of Megan McArdle's commenters pointed out, Obama's reference to the highly-concentrated Alabama health insurance market is a bit odd and incoherent. Blue Cross Blue Shield Alabama -- which has come to dominate the market in that state -- is actually a not-for-profit insurance company. Since Obama has repeatedly argued that profit motive is one of the things stifling competition in the industry, the Alabama case seems to undermine his point.
[A]lthough there is room for government to help advance the cause of economic mobility in America, it can do so mostly by encouraging personal responsibility. Poverty in America is a function of culture and behavior at least as much as of entrenched injustice, and economic mobility calls not for wealth-transfer programs but for efforts that support and uphold the cultural institutions that have always enabled prosperity: education, work, marriage, and responsible child-rearing.
Thus, the inequality debate is not nearly as relevant to the more important question of mobility as it sometimes seems to many advocates and politicians. Inequality is a cloudy lens through which to understand the problems of poverty and mobility, and it does not point toward solutions. Great wealth is not a social problem; great poverty is. And great wealth neither causes poverty nor can readily alleviate it. Only by properly targeting poverty, and by understanding its social, cultural, and moral dimensions, can well-intentioned policymakers hope to make a dent in American poverty — and thereby advance mobility and sustain the American Dream.
One example of the principle of equity as the driving force [in the policymaking process] is the case of the government's renal dialysis program. As soon as the technology for convenient dialysis was perfected, it became clear that some people were receiving this life-giving treatment and others were not. The selections of patients to receive treatment were made on the basis of ability to pay, qualification for experimental study groups, proximity to the few centers where dialysis was being performed, and the happenstance of personal health insurance coverage. Gripping stories appeared in the popular media about "death committees" of physicians that were charged with deciding whose lives should or should not be saved.
Such a fundamental, dramatic difference of treatment was more than decision-makers could bear. The Senate passed a short rider introduced right on the floor which provided that renal dialysis and kidney transplants be financed by Medicare, and the House quickly followed suit. So compelling was the inequity that had thrust this item onto the agenda that Congress really did not consider the cost of the program in any detail, a cost that exceeded a billion dollars within a few short years. As one knowledgeable respondent summarized the forces that lead to such sudden agenda status and passage, "When there is serious inequity, that is politically and socially unstable. Once a technology is developed, everybody will want it." The moral pressure to avoid letting people die, when a procedure was available to save them but for a cost, was simply irresistible.
There are many good reasons to oppose assisted suicide. It transforms a healing profession into a killing profession. It encourages relatives to see a loved one’s slow death as a problem to be solved, rather than a trial to be accepted. And as Emanuel noted in his 1997 essay, its “beneficiaries” are far more likely to be suffering from psychological distress than unbearable physical pain.
But in the profligate, Promethean United States, it probably won’t lead to rationing-by-euthanasia. It’s just as likely to become one more “intervention” that we insist every health insurance plan should cover — on our way, perhaps, to a rendezvous with fiscal suicide.
Most Republicans say the Democratic bills are radical and socialist. My problem with them is they are modest and timid. The Democrats say the current health care system is dysfunctional, then they preserve and extend it. They don’t touch the fee-for-service system. They don’t touch the employer-based system. They don’t alter the runaway costs.
. . .
The problem is that incremental reform doesn’t work. We have to go back and redo the system. My big takeway from this whole mess is that incremental reform doesn’t work. We have to go back and redo the system. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, the Wyden-Bennett approach is the way to go. It has bipartisan support. It is consistent with traditional American values, emphasizing individual choice, not top down control. It reins in costs in the only way acceptable to American voters, through competition not executive fiat. It would liberate us from the employer-based system that is dying anyway.
. . .
Two other random points. First, the political gridlock right now has nothing to do with Republicans. Democratic moderates are now firmly against the public option and I suspect generally against the Obama approach, because it will cost so many of them their jobs. The House is gridlocked, and it is under total Democratic control. The Senate is too, and would be even if Ted Kennedy’s seat were filled tomorrow.Second, it should be said that most of the special interests are wildly in favor of the Democratic approach. The lobbyists are spending far more to support it than to defeat it. Big pharmaceuticals spend more money on TV ads than John McCain spent in his fall campaign. And despite this avalanche of money the public is still leaning against reform, at least as currently envisioned by the White House and the Congressional leadership. The public isn’t always right, but the majority views are at least worth taking seriously. Especially if you want to win elections.
It's one thing to say there's a shared obligation not to let people suffer or die when we know how they could live many years longer, or in much less pain. I find it a whole lot less compelling to suggest that people are entitled to public provision of, say, Tacerva—which . . . was approved to treat pancreatic cancers because it improves survival time by a whopping 12 days at a monthly cost of $3,500.
I'm not saying that this is the standard we should adopt. But I actually think that it has a fair amount of emotional resonance, which is why appeals from cancer patients are so effective when they're denied marginal treatments.
