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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: 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.