Naturally.
Racism and Cruelty Drive GOP Health Care Agenda — Truthdig
Before he was disgraced into resigning his presidency over the Watergate burglary scandal, Richard Nixon had successfully engineered an even more odious plot known as his Southern Strategy. The trick was devilishly simple: Appeal to the persistent racist inclination of Southern whites by abandoning the Republican Party’s historic association with civil rights and demonizing the black victims of the South’s history of segregation.
That same divisive strategy is at work in the Republican rejection of the Affordable Care Act. GOP governors are largely in control of the 26 states, including all but Arkansas in the South, that have refused to implement the act’s provision for an expansion of Medicaid to cover the millions of American working poor who earn too much to qualify for the program now. A New York Times analysis of census data concludes that as a result of the Republican governors’ resistance, “A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help. …” […]
In the end, this is a replay of the civil rights drama that gripped the nation more than half a century ago, but back then the Republican Party, following the enlightened leadership of Dwight Eisenhower, was on the humanitarian side of the equation. Now the elected leaders of a party that has been on the side of emancipation since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln acts to deny the basic human right to life-sustaining health care to the Southern progeny of slaves. As the Times study noted: “In all, 6 out of 10 blacks live in the states not expanding Medicaid. In Mississippi, 56 percent of all poor and uninsured adults are black, though they account for just 38 percent of the population.”