Comments on: Report: Race helps drive healthcare debate

By: John W

John W — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:40:20 +0000

I’m one who supported the legislation and see it as an imperfect bill that should be improved upon, not trashed. And, yes, I’m an Obama supporter. But there is some tortured logic here. It does not necessarily follow that because one is both (a) white and racially resentful and (b)vocally opposed to the health care law that “a” and “b” are related. For example, we wouldn’t conclude that opposition to the health care law influences their racial resentment. So, it does not necessarily follow that their racial resentment influences their beliefs about health care. That said, had Mitt Romney been nominated and elected in 2008 and proposed some form of RomneyCare for the nation, I suspect we would have seen an entirely different response.

By: Josh Richman

Josh Richman — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:44:10 +0000

Val: Though I disagree with your characterization of the Tribune as “where everything is always about race and black people and never about the larger picture,” I take your point about how some people opposed the Affordable Care Act because it didn’t go far enough and/or because of the individual mandate’s burden upon the working class. That said, the more vocal majority of the law’s opponents – those who now are spearheading its repeal – overwhelmingly are conservatives who believe the government should have less or no role in health care.

As for the methodology, I linked to the report so everyone could review and judge it for themselves. But whatever you make of their statistical analysis, they didn’t “ask leading questions” because they didn’t ask questions at all; their report is based on correlations they say they found in data gathered by a widely used and well-respected national academic study.

By: Val Eisman

Val Eisman — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 18:09:33 +0000

Many unions opposed Obamacare initially and still don’t feel it’s a good bill for their membership. Many of these unions have both white and black membership. The issues the unions had with Obama’s bill had nothing to do with the fact that it serviced people of color. It was that the bill was watering down the medical benefits of union members who had given up concessions and wage increases to get better healthcare benefits while asking union members to pay more for their plans.

I’m wondering if this Greenlining insitute didn’t ask leading questions of race to begin with which tainted their findings instead of delving directly into people’s opposition to Obamacare. The article doesn’t explain the methodology of their survey and is highly suspect in my opinion. Because it appears from the survey that it is the Institute that is introducing the idea of race into all of this. Many people opposed Obama’s healthcare strictly because it required mandatory healthcare coverage that most minimum wage and low wage workers simply cannot afford.

This article really goes off the central issues of why there was widespread opposition even amongst progressives to Obama’s bill. It does absolutely nothing to cap healthcare premiums nor address the failures of the big HMO’s in terms of the quality of their healthcare. It maintains high drug prices while creating a monopoly for big pharmaceutical here at home by continuing to deny Americans access to foreign drugs from abroad.

This survey, IMO, was a loaded question and survey from the gitgo. They just wanted to introduce race into a subject that is more important and has less to do with race than any lack of real reform of the healthcare industry. This kind of article is typical of what you find in the Tribune where everything is always about race and black people and never about the larger picture. If anything, this article promotes the very thing it ostensibly abhors by constantly keeping the race pot churning even when larger issues totally outweigh the consideration of race in the matter. By continuing to focus in on the nonimportant elements of healthcare rather than doing an article on Vermont’s efforts to implement singlepayer now, you do a disserve to those you are supposedly championing–all those racially oppressed minorities who neither follow nor pay attention to the ongoing issues in the struggle to create affordable healthcare for all.