The Impact of Obamacare, in Four Maps By and OCT. 31, 2016
Just had a look at the progress of “Obamacare” according to a study by the New York Times.
Apparently this insurance program is fated to be linked to President Obama in perpetuity, but you could have a worse legacy– for example the War in Iraq.
The bad news is that four states have barely budged in reducing the number of uninsured from 2013-16, leaving their citizens as poorly insured for medical care as they were four years ago. The prize-winners are Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Mississippi. As the Times pointed out, neighboring states Kentucky and Arkansas have left them in the dust.
The states have some control of these developments, depending on whether they opted into the Medicaid provisions of Obamacare. There are plenty of citizens on Medicaid in those four states, but their leaders spurned the incentives for adopting the Medicaid provisions of Obamacare, because of their repugnance for federal help in general and Obamacare in particular. They are beginning to look like Third World countries, with their outstanding neglect of the social and biological needs of their citizens. It is hard to imagine such callous disregard for the needy within the boundaries of the U.S.
It is likewise hard to imagine how these needy could fail to vote and vote against the Republican leadership prevailing in these states. Still, you have to walk a mile in their shoes to appreciate their hopelessness and paralysis in the depths of a political climate that blames the poor for their circumstances.
If the tired, poor and huddled masses of the Deep South could only amass the political will to turn on their oppressors. I am no Marxist, but witnessing this wanton neglect in this poverty zone of America brings revulsion and revolution to my heart. How can we deliver these citizens from a life unworthy of our standards of compassion?
For all its flaws, Obamacare offers a safety net to citizens who are in free fall. May these falling ones grab a corner of this net and vote against the harsh rule that has pulled it out from under them. A flawed program is better than no program at all, if it rescues the citizens of the Deep South, the USA’s Third World territory.