Ed Kilgore has a really great must-read article about how the Republicans are pretending to be fans of Medicare to red-bait and race-bait elderly white people and others with good insurance on health care reform. It’s the same image of the “welfare queen” that Republicans (and neoliberals) have been humping for decades now, and of course it’s racist. The regular invocation of laziness to describe people considered unworthy—-in this case, of buying insurance—-is a coded racist stereotype. The mere whiff of the word “lazy” sets off the Republican base at this point to think of black people, though it’s worth noting that Ronald Reagan, who really took this kind of race-baiting to a new level, was more overt, using geographic signifiers and terms like “young bucks”, so there was no doubt who he was talking about. That it’s Michael Steele pushing this message changes nothing, and it just reminds me of how the conservative movement employs a small army of women to argue that women shouldn’t have very many rights.
A couple of good quotes from Kilgore’s piece:
But in all the well-deserved mockery of Steele, what went largely unnoticed was his implicit attempt to stoke resentment of the uninsured by the insured – more specifically, those insured by what Republicans normally call “socialized medicine.” He referred to retirees, present and future, as “the greatest generation” (a rather anachronistic reference since today’s 65-year-olds were actually born in 1944) whose right to exactly those Medicare benefits they currently receive should not be sacrificed to Obama’s “healthcare experiment.” At another point, Steele suggested that Democrats were trying to ration healthcare so as to make procedures less available to seniors, and more available to “young and middle-aged people.”.....
What’s most interesting, and dangerous, about the new “welfare wedge” is that it’s not about poor people who don’t work for a living. After all, most very poor families often already have health insurance (depending on where they live) via Medicaid, and those who don’t work these days generally don’t have the option of working. The target of “welfare” shouters seems to be the working poor, or middle-class minority families who are struggling to stay in the middle class.
Which is why the arguments that the uninsured are lazy and worthless really can’t be much else besides race-baiting, because the uninsured are mostly people who work, and mostly people who are either laid off and actively seeking work, victims of corporate policies that will get you to work 39 hours, 59 minutes a week (but not a minute more), or people working in small, entrepreneurial businesses. In other words, these are all people that are absolutely, 100% necessary to keep our economy running the way it does, unless you think we don’t need people such as construction workers. Yes, even the unemployed are necessary, since economists assure us they are necessary to restrain inflation. As a group, the uninsured are a whole lot less white than the protesters.
But we’ve been over this ground plenty on this blog, so I’d like to address the other “undeserving” narrative that’s cropping up, and it has its own kind of classism—-the idea that the only thing that health care reform will do is redirect money from the healthy to the unhealthy, and that the unhealthy brought it on themselves. Digby posted a quote from Ashton Kutchner trotting this crap out on Bill Maher’s show.
“Frankly, I don’t want to pay for the guy who’s getting a triple-bypass because he’s eating fast food all day and deep-fried snickers bars. I don’t want to pay for him! Whether he’s wealthy or he’s not!”