July 12, 2017
Page 7
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O PINION
Stand Up for the Human Right of Health Care
Join allies for a
healthy America
m arian W right e delman
In a country that says it
values life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness, how
can any of our leaders of
any political party or ide-
ology propose actions to
slash health care for tens
of millions of the neediest
in order to give tax cuts to the ex-
tremely non-needy wealthy, favor-
ing millionaires over mothers, bil-
lionaires over babies, and powerful
corporations already garnering huge
sums in government subsidies over
children?
That is what the Senate version of
the already obscenely unjust House-
passed American Health Care Act
(AHCA) would do. Crafted in secret
by 13 white men without a single
hearing, the Senate health bill that
purports to repeal the Affordable
Care Act (ACA) actually caps and
cuts Medicaid — an indispensable
lifeline that has served America’s
most vulnerable children, mothers
giving birth, people with disabili-
ties and vulnerable elderly well for
more than 50 years.
by
But in a representative democra-
cy like ours the people elect mem-
bers of Congress to represent us
and be our voice. As members of
the Senate headed home to their
districts for their July
4th recess it’s up to us
to fulfill our democratic
duty and make sure our
voices are heard and
make sure our Senators
fulfill their democratic
duty to protect all their
¬constituencies and not just those
who make campaign contributions
to them or their political party.
Here are five of the many ways
the Senate’s misleadingly and
wrongly named “Better Care Rec-
onciliation Act” (BCRA), more ap-
propriately named the “Worse Care
Reconciliation Act,” harms chil-
dren, offers worse care and makes
us question the moral judgment of
our Senate leaders:
1. Ends Medicaid as we know
it, jeopardizing the health of 40 per-
cent of America’s children. Medic-
aid currently ensures comprehen-
sive, affordable health coverage for
37 million low-income and disabled
children, including 40 percent of
all children with special health care
needs, and covers more than 40
percent of all births. Who is going
to meet this huge need if Medicaid
crumbles?
2. Slashes $772 billion in Med-
icaid to give tax cuts to wealthy
individuals and powerful corpora-
tions, placing the interests of those
who need help the most below
those who need no government as-
sistance. The 400 highest income
taxpayers alone would receive tax
cuts worth about $33 billion over
10 years. Millionaires would get tax
cuts exceeding $50,000 a year. The
Senate bill would cut $100 billion in
taxes for drug companies and health
insurers.
3. Makes at least 22 million
more Americans uninsured, 15
million from Medicaid alone. The
non-partisan Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) estimates 15 million
people would become uninsured in
2018 and a total of 22 million peo-
ple would be added to the ranks of
the uninsured by 2026. The CBO
concludes this bill alone would re-
sult in a 26 percent reduction in
Medicaid funding over 10 years and
grow to a 35 percent reduction by
the end of the next ten years as the
cap on funding tightens.
4. Severely restricts Medicaid
dollars that now help disabled chil-
dren and adults remain at home, in
communities and out of institutions
and help schools and child protec-
tion agencies better meet children’s
needs.
5. Leaves millions of Ameri-
cans paying more for less health
care. Premiums, deductibles and
other forms of cost-sharing will
dramatically raise costs, particularly
for older and sicker people, and at
the same time states will be allowed
to limit coverage for essential health
benefits such as maternity and pe-
diatric care, substance abuse treat-
ment, mental health treatment, and
habilitative care.
Good health in our country with
the biggest economy in the world
should be a right and not a privilege
for all and not just for the wealthy.
Every life is sacred and of equal
value. I agree with Dr. King that “of
all the forms of inequality, injustice
in health is the most shocking and
inhuman.”
So please stand up and make
your voice heard in no uncertain
terms. Be as loud and as persistent
as you can until your leaders do the
right thing for all their constituents
and all in America.
Demand that your Senators reject
the cruel and unjust “Worse Care”
Reconciliation Act. Ask them to do
for your children and family mem-
bers what they enjoy at taxpayers’
expense for their own children and
family members. Your voices have
already made a difference. Recent
national polls show fewer than one
in five people approve of the Senate
bill. But keep going and increase the
pressure on anyone seeking to wipe
out the health protections everyone
in America needs and deserves.
Visit or call Senators’ state of-
fices. Join other allies for a healthy
America in town hall meetings and
other forums. This is a life and death
struggle for millions of people of all
ages about who we are and what we
value as a nation.
If you believe that children’s lives
are as important as corporate profits
and babies’ and mothers’ chances
to be healthy are as important as
billionaires and millionaires, stand
up and be heard. Do not be fooled
by the alternative and fake name of
the Better Care Reconciliation Act.
It’s a Trojan horse — rotten to the
core. No amount of tinkering can
fix it. Urge your Senators to step up
to #ProtectMedicaid and all genera-
tions from health injustice.
Marian Wright Edelman is Presi-
dent of the Children’s Defense Fund.
Tricks, Games Meant to Suppress Minority Voting
Skewing
democracy white
r obert c. K oehler
Every real problem this
country — and this plan-
et — face is replaced by a
fantasy problem, which all
the powers of government
then pretend to address.
Meet Donald Trump, master of the
street con, trickster extraordinaire.
How many cabinet positions and
high-level government posts have
been filled by someone whose life
work and raison d’etre make him or
her the least qualified person imag-
inable for the job? Names burst
from the news: Scott Pruitt, Betsy
DeVos, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions . . .
And now there’s Kris Kobach,
who brings an ironic twist to the
con, in that he’s actually a perfect fit
for the position he has recently been
given by Trump: vice chairman of
the Presidential Advisory Commis-
sion on Election Integrity, a.k.a.,
the voter fraud commission, whose
mandate is to stanch the flow of il-
legal people swarming into Ameri-
ca’s polling places by the millions
and, ahem, voting. Good God, they
almost threw the election to Hillary
last year.
by
Kobach, Kansas secretary of
state, is the guy who developed
Crosscheck, a voter-tracking sys-
tem that is ingenious in its inanity:
It finds people on the list of
registered voters in participat-
ing states who have the same
names, like . . . oh, James
Brown (actual example) . . .
and declares that they are one
person voting multiple times.
And they are then subject to remov-
al from the voter roll, even (eye-
ball roll is appropriate here) if their
middle names differ. This is such an
obviously inept process it’s hard to
believe anyone on the planet takes
it seriously. But it’s part of hardcore
Republican governance.
It’s almost as though, in an eerie
way, Trump Republicans really do
believe that illegal voters are invad-
ing the system — if not technically
illegal, then morally illegal, in that
voting against Trump proposals or
Republican ideas in general (the
wall, the elimination of Medicaid)
is a sign that that you’re not a real
American. And this is especially true
if you belong to a racial minority.
The mission of Kobach’s com-
mission is to ensure that Republican
America holds strong, even as the
party itself sinks ever more deeply
into minority status.
The New York Times editorial
board defined the “real goal” of the
Commission on Election Integri-
ty thus: “to make voting harder for
millions of Americans, on the under-
standing that Republicans win more
elections when fewer people vote.”
Investigative reporter Greg Pa-
last, who has long been sounding
the warning about Crosscheck, put
it a bit more bluntly: “This country
is violently divided, but in the end,
there simply aren’t enough white
guys to elect Trump nor a Repub-
lican Senate. The only way they
could win was to eliminate the votes
of non-white guys—and they did so
by tossing Black provisional ballots
into the dumpster, ID laws that turn
away students — the list goes on.
It’s a web of complex obstacles to
voting by citizens of color topped
by that lying spider, Crosscheck.”
American quasi-democracy has a
long, long history of what one might
call protective racism, and it hasn’t
gone away. What requires protec-
tion is the status quo of power. And
nothing is more inconvenient to
the status quo than real democracy,
with regular people having a say in
the creation of their social structure.
That means the politically powerful
are always vulnerable, especially if
they focus on serving their own in-
terests, not their constituents’. You
can see the problem with that.
The Crosscheck program, as well
as the presidential claim that the
problem with America’s democra-
cy is that too many people are vot-
ing, are examples of contemporary
— deeply coded — racial politics.
According to Palast, Crosscheck’s
list of suspect voters in the 2016
election “was so racially biased
that fully one in six registered Af-
rican-Americans were tagged in
the Crosscheck states that include
the swing states of Michigan, Ohio,
North Carolina, Arizona and more.”
Forget about the Russians. Elec-
tion tampering is a game played by
Republicans. And it’s hardly limit-
ed to Crosscheck. Another highly
effective vote suppression measure
is the recent spate of strict voter ID
laws, which, according to a study by
researchers at the University of Cal-
ifornia San Diego, “skew democra-
cy in favor of whites and those on
the political right.”
This is because “the lack of prop-
er identification” — that is, a gov-
ernment-issued photo ID — “is not
evenly distributed across the popu-
lation. Studies show that a lack of
identification is particularly acute
among the minority population, the
poor, and the young,” according to
the study.
Furthermore, existing laws are
not applied evenly. Instead, “poll
workers disproportionately ask mi-
norities for identification.” And, the
study notes, “these laws are passed
almost exclusively by Republicans
and . . . they tend to emerge in states
with larger black populations.”
Other tricks and games meant to
suppress minority voting include
fewer polling locations, shorter
hours for voting, repeal of same-day
voter registration and the disenfran-
chisement of felons and (in three
states) ex-felons, which is one of
many shattering consequences of
the country’s expanded prison-in-
dustrial complex.
“The effects of voter ID laws that
we see here are eerily similar to the
impact of measures like poll taxes,
literacy tests, residency require-
ments, and at-large elections which
were used by the white majority
decades and centuries ago to help
deny blacks many basic rights,” the
study concludes.
The fraud is committed by those
who govern, not those who vote. It
comes from the top down.
Robert Koehler, syndicat-
ed by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago
award-winning journalist and ed-
itor.