Yet in a political milieu fraught with strategic racial innuendo, Obamacare is racially potent. It picks up the other slanders piled around the president and it piles these onto the Southern Strategy slam that liberalism panders to undeserving minorities. In a country with 48 million uninsured persons and among the highest health care costs in the world, we all lose when coded racial appeals poison our politics. -- huffingtonpost/ian-haney-lopez/obamacare-dog-whistle-politics_b_4759499.html ------- In places where the uninsured rate plummeted this year, Republicans still scored big electoral victories. Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia — states that saw substantial drops in the proportion of their residents without insurance — all elected Republican Senate candidates who oppose the Affordable Care Act. Control of the West Virginia state House of Delegates flipped from Democrats to Republicans. And Arkansas elected Republican supermajorities to both houses of its legislature along with a Republican governor, a situation that could imperil the Medicaid expansion that helped more than 200,000 of its poorest residents get health insurance.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 19:23:52 +0000