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We know that about 10 million more people have insurance coverage this year as a result of the Affordable Care Act but until now it has been difficult to say much about who was getting that Obamacare coverage — where they live, their age, their income and other such details. Now Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz report in the NYT that a new data set is providing a clearer picture of which people gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The data is the output of a statistical model based on a large survey of adults and shows that the law has done something rather unusual in the American economy this century: It has pushed back against inequality, essentially redistributing income — in the form of health insurance or insurance subsidies — to many of the groups that have fared poorly over the last few decades. The biggest winners from the law include people between the ages of 18 and 34; blacks; Hispanics; and people who live in rural areas. The areas with the largest increases in the health insurance rate, for example, include rural Arkansas and Nevada; southern Texas; large swaths of New Mexico, Kentucky and West Virginia; and much of inland California and Oregon.
Despite many Republican voters’ disdain for the Affordable Care Act, parts of the country that lean the most heavily Republican (according to 2012 presidential election results) showed significantly more insurance gains than places where voters lean strongly Democratic. That partly reflects underlying rates of insurance. In liberal places, like Massachusetts and Hawaii, previous state policies had made insurance coverage much more widespread, leaving less room for improvement. But the correlation also reflects trends in wealth and poverty. Many of the poorest and most rural states in the country tend to favor Republican politicians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @12:31PM
That's attitude is totally understandable when you see a mother with eight undisciplined kids in tow, no father(s) in sight, paying for her groceries using food stamps, while bitching to her friends on her brand new iPhone 6 about how she can't buy those new shoes and get a manicure because the "gubmint ain't gibin me nuff well fares".
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 31 2014, @12:52PM
Nah, I don't need a strawman, thanks. I'm perfectly content with the phrase "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give him someone else's fish and he'll vote for you." I don't want my metaphorical or actual fish, big or small, going to anyone else.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @12:56PM
That wasn't a strawman. I witnessed that a couple of weeks ago.
(Score: 1) by Squidious on Friday October 31 2014, @01:15PM
"No father(s) in sight" I like the way you inferred that she is unmarried and the kids have multiple fathers without knowing anything about her. My wife goes to the grocery store with my kids once or twice a week while I am at work. This statement has more data behind it than yours does --> You are a stereotyping POS.
The terrorists have won, game, set, match. They've scared the people into electing authoritarian regimes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @05:04PM
And why do you think there are stereotypes exist? My wife and I run a charity in our city and we see every stereotype you can name and the people just seem happy to try to fit it, regardless of race.
Have you seen the new show "Blackish"? A family with a father that can't have their kids acting to "white".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @01:03PM
A rich man, a republican and a democrat are sitting in a room with 10 twinkies. The rich man takes 8, and warns the republican that the democrat wants to take his.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @01:11PM
And what's to say the warning isn't valid, the overall inequality of the situation aside? What if the Democrat actually does want to take some of the Republican's twinky, to redistribute it to the "didadvantaged"?
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday October 31 2014, @01:55PM
The only issue is that we're kicking the poor person when we should both be kicking the Republican to get him to give up one or two more of the Twinkies. And that it's not just the Republicans doing that these days. Face it - we're an oligarchy now. This will be solved within about fifty years by another revolution. I hope I'm dead before it happens. It won't be pretty.
That is all.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 31 2014, @03:00PM
And I note that when it comes to wealth redistribution, it is much easier to steal a twinky from the poor guy than it is from the rich guy. So many of these wealth redistribution schemes go horribly wrong.
Finally, it's worth noting that the world is experiencing a time of unprecedented global growth and prosperity. If your society is not sharing in that, then you should be asking why. My view is that wealth redistribution is one of the reasons why. Power shifts from those who make twinkies to those who can steal twinkies.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday October 31 2014, @05:42PM
No, power shifts to those who hoard Twinkies, for eventually they shall have the only Twinkies.
Power accretes until it is dispersed. It seems as universal as a law of nature. You can choose to get rid of these accretions when they're small and tractable or you can wait until there's going to be a bunch of collateral damage when it finally gets taken down. The bigger the accretion, the bigger the explosion. And you, my friend, are sitting on a powder-keg of power accretion previously unimagined in the world, holding the match of improved access to information extremely close to the fuse of unmet needs. I wish you the best in our mutual upcoming skyward journey.
That is all.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 31 2014, @09:53PM
No, power shifts to those who hoard Twinkies, for eventually they shall have the only Twinkies.
It didn't work that way in the early part of the 20th Century in the US. What happened over the past few decades is simple. The balance of power between developed world labor and developed world capital shifted in favor of the latter. This is solely due to economic globalization and stiff competition with developing world labor. It stop when most of the world's labor gets employed and elevated to near developed world standards. I see that happening in about thirty years for the world outside of Africa.
Rather than steal "twinkies" from each other, which concentrates power in the hands of those who control the theft, the developed world should be thinking a lot harder about how to make its labor and other assets more valuable and less costly. There is no reason that the developed world shouldn't have very high employment rates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01 2014, @03:08AM
Twinkie@ is a registered trademark. If you make your own Twinkies, you will be arrested. That is why it is better to kick the Republican and take some of his: he has a license!!
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday October 31 2014, @01:50PM
Gosh! I've actually never heard anyone talking like that in a grocery store.
You don't need anything else than the parent post to show that classist rhetoric also hurts our society. Note the use of vernacular to tag the victim of this verbal abuse with traits of stupidity and laziness, even though we all know there are people who are poor through little or no fault of their own. I like the "eight kids" thing, too, reinforcing the meme that the lower classes are breeding too much (even if you check average birth rates, the differentials are minor - besides, if the benefits of marriage accrue mainly to the well-off, why bother with it if your not?). And I especially like the "daddy not around" part - maybe he's working at one of his three part-time minimum-wage jobs, huh? But, no, we see a poor person and assume that they're in that position because they want to maintain this state because "it's so easy" - lets see you survive on what a welfare mom gets, if you think it's so easy. We judge them and find their "effort" or "morals" wanting, even if we don't actually know what they are. We actively fight to keep them in that position by limiting help to the bare minimum allowed for survival and assume that our munificent "charity" will somehow help this person escape what their life has become. Attitudes like the parent post show fuel that hatred. Because once we make the poor sub-human, we can do what this always boils down to for all of you Scrooges out there - reducing the "surplus population".
I'd call the poster of the parent post a troll, but I really think he believes this.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday October 31 2014, @06:33PM
...I'd call the poster of the parent post a troll, but I really think he believes this.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. There is a massive logical disconnect from reality among conservatives, particularly poorer conservatives. There appears to be a belief that their taxes would disappear if they could just get rid of those minorities living it up on welfare and food stamps. Those fears are happily fed by the Republican Party leaders. They also fan, for the same reasons, the flames of social controversies like gay marriage and abortion, despite the fact it affects no one but the participants. Add that to the massive right wing propaganda campaigns against the ACA, the IRS, unions, government regulation (particularly the EPA) and Federal ownership of land and you pretty much have the Republican platform.
The goal of course is to eliminate the costs and risks of benefiting from living in our society for the wealthy, despite the fact they already benefit the most from that society. Almost every one of the items attacked by the Republicans benefit the poor and rural whites the most. Maps of food stamp use and increases of the insured under the ACA tend to show red states with the highest benefits. Those Federal lands, aside from the benefit to wildlife and biological diversity, are where millions of Americans hunt, fish, camp, hike or just enjoy the scenery. They don't seem to realize that turning it over to private ownership will result not in increased opportunities for those activities, but in increased "no trespassing" signs and/or massive environmental degradation. Unions are pretty much why workers have any benefits at all, union or not. People also forget why, but you don't have to search too hard to find the reasons the EPA was created in the first place. Do people really want to go back to the days of smog, rivers catching fire, rivers and bays too polluted to support fisheries, gas clouds descending on cities, etc? Most government regulations have not been created for the hell of it, they have been created to address issues caused by various abuses. They don't always get it right, but we could be working to make the faulty regulations work instead of eliminating all restraints on abuses.
The Democrats are moral cowards, they are too afraid of being attacked for their beliefs to stand up for them, so I can understand the lack of enthusiasm voters have for them. They should be attacking the Republicans for rolling back the liberal capitalism that helped the nation reach its greatest prosperity. Instead, they try to weasel into the vacuum in the middle caused by the Republican shift to the further right.
The Republicans however, are absolutely despicable, rolling back the modest social, environmental and economic gains that created the middle class, trying to drag us back to the decades preceding the Great Depression, wiping out the middle class and leaving the vast majority of people at the whims and mercy of the wealthy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @10:42PM
Just because you haven't personally experienced it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Maybe there aren't many people like that in your wealthy white suburban environment, but in other areas it's very common to see.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01 2014, @06:28AM
Just because you see it doesn't mean its common. People see rare things all the time.