Obama's Tepid Response to Widespread U.S. Poverty
Hot on the heels of just-released statistics about America's staggering poverty problem, President Obama released a tepid statement attempting to hype health-care reform and his infrastructure plan.
Hot on the heels of just-released statistics about America’s staggering poverty problem, President Obama released a tepid statement attempting to hype health-care reform and his infrastructure plan.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 14.3 percent of Americans are now living in poverty, the most since 1994. For blacks, that rate is 25.8 percent, almost three times the white poverty rate of 9.4 percent. This is downright scary, but you'd not guess it by looking at Obama's statement, which tries to slough off the doom by saying that it "remind[s] us that a historic recession does not have to translate into historic increases in family economic insecurity."
To give validity to his claim, Obama credits his Recovery Act with keeping "millions of Americans … out of poverty last year." He also says that the expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) "helped inoculate our children from the economic distress experienced by their parents, as there was little change in the percentage of children without health insurance."
While that may be true, even with the help of tax relief and CHIP, child poverty increased almost 2 percent in 2009, to 20.7 percent.
"For all of our challenges," Obama’s statement goes on, "I continue to be inspired by the dedication and optimism of America's workers, and I am confident that we will emerge from this storm with a stronger economy."
Tempering that optimism is, of course, some harsh realities about the declining hope of the nation's labor force: Besides poverty increasing, the rate of American workers concerned about their financial future jumped to 75 percent, and the number of American workers using opiates has increased by 40 percent since 2005.
-Cord Jefferson is a staff writer at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.
Virginia Takes First Step in Rejecting Health Care Reform
Despite the Justice Department’s protestations, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson refused to dismiss the suit, which claims that Congress can not force Americans to purchase health insurance under penalty of fine.
The state of Virginia's lawsuit challenging President Obama's landmark health care reform bill has circumvented its first legal blockade today. Despite the Justice Department’s protestations, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson refused to dismiss the suit, which claims that Congress can not force Americans to purchase health insurance under penalty of fine.
Earlier this year, the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation exempting the state’s citizens from a coverage mandate. Hudson mentioned that law in his opinion, saying it “is sufficient to trigger the duty of the Attorney General of Virginia to defend the law and the associated sovereign power to enact it.”
While this is indeed a blow for the administration, the worst may be yet to come: a dozen other state attorneys general have filed a similar but separate lawsuit in Florida that will go before a judge in the coming weeks. And on Tuesday, Missouri voters are expected to reject the coverage mandate by popular vote.
-Cord Jefferson is a staff writer at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.
Why Obama Should Tax Weaves
Tomorrow begins the federal tax on tanning, the 10-percent toll Obama’s health care bill thrust upon people who wanted to continue risking their health for perceived beauty. Is it time to similarly tax weaves?
If you’ve not yet seen the most recent pictures of Naomi Campbell’s bald head, I suggest you click here and look. It’s amazing to see how grotesque a two-inch by two-inch unblemished patch of skin can be. It’s not hideous because it’s bald, mind you—Alek Wek is bald and gorgeous—but because the damage was so entirely avoidable. Had Campbell, who is one of the most beautiful woman in the world, according to her employers, simply not yanked out her natural hair with extensions for the past couple decades, her baldness would be nonexistent, and she wouldn’t need that very obvious wig.
According to the American Academy of Dermatology, hair loss affects some 30 million women annually for a variety of medical reasons, including everything from androgenic alopecia to traumatic events. For many black women, however, baldness also begins in the beauty salon. For proof, see the retreating hairlines of celebrities like Vivica Fox and Tyra Banks, women whose idea of primping has for years been weighing down their natural hair with synthetic strands or outright poisoning their ‘dos into submission. A person can only systematically destroy their hair for so long before they’ve got no more hair to destroy, and Vivica and Tyra and Naomi can now tell you that without ever saying a word.
Tomorrow begins the federal tax on tanning, the 10-percent toll Obama’s health care bill thrust upon people who wanted to continue risking their health for perceived beauty. Is it time to similarly tax weaves?
If your answer is no, because female baldness doesn’t impact health insurance costs the way skin cancer does, consider that there is now a cadre of women lobbying—at least on the Internet—for health insurance providers to pay for wigs for balding women. Some insurance already pays for wigs for cancer patients enduring chemotherapy, but these women want free wigs for all women suffering hair loss, as well as money for therapy to treat the “devastating effect hair loss has on a woman’s self image.” And while it’s not suggested that women take anti-balding medications like Avodart, some are, and some Avodart users claim their insurance is covering the pills.
Indeed, assuming that wigs and therapy for 30 million will cost more than $10 per patient, we can guess that female baldness might actually cost more than treating skin cancer—$291 million in 2004.
Knowing this, let’s tax weaves. Besides helping to offset the costs associated with female baldness, in this economy, the tariff might also cause some women to question the decision to ruin their scalps in the first place. Perhaps some of the money saved could even go toward things like social welfare programs designed to help young black girls stop fetishizing straight blonde hair in the first place. It’s going to be hard to combat Beyonce’s influence, but we can try.
-Cord Jefferson is a staff writer at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.
Why Democrats Deserve a Pat on the Back for The Health Care Bill
The Senate has voted to vote on health care reform. That may not seem like much, but it's important that Democrats get credit for doing what no Congress has ever done before.
The Senate has voted to vote on health care reform. Reactions to the series of late-night, last-minute votes that should, if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has his way, result in that chamber’s passage of a health care reform bill by Christmas Day, has been mixed. On the one hand, progressives are mad (really mad) at Senator Joe Lieberman and the assorted centrists who have watered down what they consider to be key provisions of the bill. On the other hand, relieved lawmakers (including the White House) are just happy that Barack Obama hasn’t had to renege on his summer swagger, which promised the nation “we will get this done this year.” Of course, the bill, yet unpassed, is by no means final (it will have to be reconciled with the version that the House of Representatives passed in late October), but there is hope for both camps in what the Senate got done this weekend.
For black Americans, the bill should provide long-term peace of mind. Health disparities and barriers to access have long plagued the community (for more, read Kai Wright’s excellent précis on just what African Americans are fighting for). The years of failure to reform the system has cost countless lives. “Real people are going bankrupt, losing their homes and even dying for real health care reform in this country,” says Ben Jealous, President of the NAACP. Groups like La Raza, the Campaign for Community Change, the Leadership Council on Civil Rights and Health Care for America Now have all made similar statements about what health care reform means to communities of color. The legislation’s universal mandate, generous subsidies for low-income Americans, insurance industry reforms and—most importantly—cost control mechanisms, which physician Atul Gawande documents in fine detail in a recent issue of the New Yorker, should make a significant impact in that troublesome status quo:
At the current rate of increase, the cost of family insurance will reach twenty-seven thousand dollars or more in a decade, taking more than a fifth of every dollar that people earn. Businesses will see their health-coverage expenses rise from ten per cent of total labor costs to seventeen per cent. Health-care spending will essentially devour all our future wage increases and economic growth. State budget costs for health care will more than double, and Medicare will run out of money in just eight years. The cost problem, people have come to realize, threatens not just our prosperity but our solvency.
Those problems are not gone. But they will be smaller problems, thanks to the committed work of lawmakers who dragged the bill thisclose to the finish line. In short, these reforms will positively affect the health and wealth of all Americans, particularly the minority population that is significantly more likely than non-Hispanic whites to be uninsured.
As for the politics of the bill: Right-wing critiques of the legislation range from skepticism that costs can be contained to apoplectic reaction to what’s seen as the creation of massive new system of "socialist" entitlements. Compared with Bush 43 administration policy on Medicare, such critiques are, as Eric Alterman points out at the Center for American Progress, fairly hypocritical:
[Medicare Advantage, passed in 2003] handed over massive subsidies of literally billions of taxpayer dollars to global corporations while allowing overall medical costs to rise and at the same time shielding Medicare customers from real prices. What’s more, for all of the conservative complaints about the “process” through which the president and congressional leaders have sought to achieve passage of the bill, the Medicare legislation set new records for abusive [sic] of minority rights.
Democrats, elected in large numbers in 2006 and 2008 in order to change the way government interacts with American citizens, can proudly say they are in the majority here—not just in Washington, but in terms of public sentiment about the need for better health care delivery.
Why is it important that Democrats have stood firm on passing a health care bill, however flawed? At The New Republic, Jonathan Chait makes the good point that if Republicans had been more willing to engage with the health care debate in good faith, we might today see a significantly more conservative legislation with a dramatically smaller budget. So Democratic ownership of this bill has been key to pushing the legislation as far left as has been politically palatable. And, while even Obama might not go so far as to call the compromise bill “sexy” (that praise he reserved for home weatherization), it is no doubt a significant and worthwhile attempt to reform the health care delivery system in the U.S.
Personally, I’m skeptical that the political capital that Obama has enjoyed in the first year of his presidency was well-spent on health care reform. The vicissitudes of a partisan Washington and a recession-shocked public almost guarantee that what benefit Americans will eventually derive from this bill comes at a political cost to Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.
Ezra Klein, however, who has been doing yeoman’s work all year to simplify arguments and advocate for the best possible version of a health care bill, offered some comforting analysis about the likelihood that the legislation will only get better:
[Section 1332 of the Senate bill] allows states to wiggle out of the consequences of those imperfections. Rather than having to go back through the Congress and the Senate to change a part of the bill, a state that finds the bill’s language inefficient for achieving the bill’s goals can simply petition the secretary of Health and Human Services for a waiver. No new legislation needed. No filibusters or holds to evade. No national agenda to contend with.
The law for the law of unintended consequences is also an important reminder that this bill represents the beginning, rather than the end, of health-care reform. “I am not the first president to take up this cause,” Obama said back in September, “but I am determined to be the last.” He will not be the last, or even close to it.
So to those progressives, myself included, who have been disappointed with the demise of the “public option” and other compromises contained in the final version of the health care bill, it’s important to remember that this will be a victory for Democrats and, as Obama said this weekend, a “genuine reform that offers security to those who have health insurance and affordable options to those for do not.”
I can live with that.
—DAYO OLOPADE
Begging To Live
If not for the vigilance of one ill uninsured student, he would be dead now. Why stories like these ought to be influencing health care policy and not bureaucracy.
As politicians on both side of the aisle wait on their checks from the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies to clear so they can vote on health care reform there are people out there literally begging for their lives to be spared.
Such is the case for Freddie Effinger, who nearly died two years ago after discovering a “bizarre pain” in his upper thigh that couldn’t be properly dealt with because he didn’t have health insurance.
As reported in the Huffington Post Effinger was told that it was probably some sort of mass and that it matter (described as nothing serious) and would be removed surgically in September.
But as fate would have it, doctors discovered something far more serious and sadly Effinger didn’t have insurance. Like many post-college graduates, insurance companies drop them following graduation. In many cases – like mine – I almost had to send proof on enrollment every few months as the insurance company wanted to boot me much earlier.
Without insurance, Effinger’s condition grew worse.
Arthur Delaney of The Huffington Post writes:
“But when they operated, Effinger's doctors discovered something more serious.
‘The tumor was the same size as my hand,’ Effinger told the Huffington Post. ‘And directly underneath that tumor was another tumor, and further down my leg was another tumor.’
The following month, an oncologist told Effinger he had advanced stage lymphoma. The oncologist told him that his chemotherapy could cost tens of thousands of dollars per session, and that he would need 12 sessions. Effinger panicked.
‘My mom's a schoolteacher and my dad's a juvenile detention officer,’ Effinger said. ‘They're good people, but that's not going to happen.’
Effinger scrambled to find insurance to no avail. Fortunately, with no income he qualified for a charity program at St. Vincent's East in Birmingham, Alabama. Yet Effinger still owes some $9,000 for parts of his treatment on top of the $100,000 he owns in student loans. Student loan debt collectors tend to be about as kind as Satan when hell gets a breeze, but they’ve actually been nicer to him than the people hounding him to pay back medical fees.
Now that he’s become an advocate for health care reform Effinger makes his feelings clear:
"I'm a pretty humble guy, but it's really demoralizing to have to beg a hospital for your life, to be to be able to be treated for this thing you just found out that you had. I don't just have a right to be healthy? I have to beg for it? I have to show that I am poor? It's frustrating. It's embarrassing. It's really unacceptable."
It’s time like these where I want to sing a Cuban remix to “Oh Canada.”
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