I see the current efforts to extend healthcare to all Americans to be an extension of the issues of equality of opportunity that were expressed by President Obama in his speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights movement. Ironically, it is hard to imagine a great country with more than an eighth of its population denied access to one of the fundamentals necessary to be a productive member of society. Statistics often hide even more disturbing facts.
If you ask what percentage of the more than 40 million Americans without access to healthcare (not including the majority of undocumented people, more than 10 million of them) are white and non-Hispanic you discover the answer is 46%, or about 18 or 19 million. The minorities–including African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians and others–are 54% of the uninsured, or over 22 million. Even those numbers hide the truth because as of the last census, white non-Hispanics were 63% of the population, or about 200 million. That means that if you were white you had over a 90 % chance of having healthcare. Our total population is a little north of 310 million, meaning that if you were not part of the white majority you had only about an 80% chance of having access to healthcare.
“So what’s the big deal?” you may ask. Well, the big deal is that the uninsured die at rates higher than the insured and they suffer disproportionately. Ironically, because of our current combination of social services and the disproportionate application of the Medicaid extension of the ACA by the choice of states following the ruling of the Supreme Court and further threatened by King v. Burwell, the uninsured of all races are the working poor and not the welfare recipients that so many of our politicians seem to loathe and deride as they use negative emotions and fear to win the votes that keep them in office.
There is a huge amount of data that allows us to imagine the true costs of these facts to individuals and to us collectively as a society. Just as an example, let me direct your attention to a document about the health status of African Americans to emphasize what the President refers to as the “urgency of now.”
http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts/factsheets/2012/04/aca-and-african-americans04122012a.html
To quote my favorite of Dr. Martin Luther King’s sayings, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.”
