Ashton Kutcher on health care

On the Bill Maher show in August, Ashton Kutcher said:

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!

This is another of the more popular arguments against universal health insurance, that it’s somehow unfair for the healthy to pay for those who are unhealthy because of what they consider personal choices.  While I don’t think Kutcher is thinking about race here, this is a connection that can be and has been made.

Read this post for an example of this same argument, not wanting to pay for the obese who are disproportionately poor and minorities, in explicitly racial terms (I won’t quote to avoid repeating the offensive language, but you get the idea).

Ta-Nehisi Coates on race, class and obesity

A beautiful, moving blog post from Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic.  Wonderful writing: read the whole thing.

But more than that, it’s the world I live in. The buses in Harlem heave under the weight of wrecked bodies. New York will not super-size itself, so you’ll see whole rows in which one person is taking up two seats and aisles in which people strain to squeeze past each other. And then there are the middle-age amputees in wheelchairs who’ve lost a leg or two way before their time. When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got.

I was there among them–the blacker and fatter–and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters. As a child, and a young adult, I was lucky. Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life. But out in the world you come to see, in the words of Peggy Olson, that they have it all–and so much of it. Working on the richest island in the world, then training through Brooklyn, or watching the buses slog down 125th has become a kind of corporeal metaphor–the achievement gap of our failing bodies, a slow sickness as the racial chasm.

What do you suppose he means by “the achievement gap of our failing bodies”?  I am deeply curious what you think about this.

Sen. Ted Kennedy on health care

At the Democratic National Convention, Aug 26, 2008:

For me, this is a season of hope, new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many and not just for the few, new hope. And this is the cause of my life, new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American – north, south, east, west, young, old – will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.

Olbermann interviews Professor Harris-Lacewell on racism

Olbermann on racist attacks against Obama

census data

September 2009 census data on income, poverty, and health insurance:

Meanwhile, the number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008, while the percentage remained unchanged at 15.4 percent.

Note that the numbers of uninsured tend to increase with the increase in population while the rate of uninsured tends to stay constant (only up by around 2 percent since 1989).  This is in contrast with the dramatically rising rates of uninsured among young workers, and the rising cost of premiums, which are part of the impetus for the current reforms.

uninsured among young workers

From AFL-CIO study in September:

31 percent of young workers report being uninsured, up from 24 percent 10 years ago, and 79 percent of the uninsured say they don’t have coverage because they can’t afford it or their employer does not offer it.

45,000 US deaths per year from lack of health insurance

from Reuters, this September:

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

“obama care” critique of health care reform

thought bubbler: health care overhaul