I don’t know, maybe if you represent a state from the Old Confederacy you shouldn’t repeatedly refer to Medicaid as a medical ghetto. It just sounds a bit racist. Don’t you think?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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This diary from a couple of months ago pretty much nails the prevailing attitudes about Medicaid. Alexander and many other republicans are simply exploiting this stereotype for political gain. Basically, more “welfare wedge” bullshit to convince people that their tax dollars are being “wasted” on “lazy” people who “don’t want to work.”
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/19/141357/866
two of the Republican’s biggest complaints about the health care bill are:
It’s a government run program.
And:
It cuts Medicare funding.
Not to mention all the teabaggers screaming “Keep your filthy government hands off my Medicare!”
Seems to me the real question is, how come the richest country in the world maintains a medical ghetto?
It’s on purpose, of course.
People allowing the notion that it’s just a mistake provide cover for them.
It may be more veiled than the “call me Harold” TV ad of Alexander’s fellow Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, but it’s racism just the same.
And mind you, Alexander is supposed to be one of the reasonable, “moderate” Republicans.
it’s straight up racism, and not a shock.
1 out of 5 citizens in TN is on Medicaid,
considering that the Black population of TN is only 16%….
there’s nothing subtle here.
Look, the comment is meant to demagogue in two possible ways:
But the comment is right about the third thing it implies: Medicaid is poor care for poor people. Sorry, but very few doctors take it, and it’s hard to get good care if Medicaid is what you’ve got.
The rebuttal to this stupid comment from Alexander should be: Great, let’s end Medicaid and properly subsidize people so they can choose a plan on the exchange with copays and deductibles they can afford. Democrats are not doing that because it would be too expensive, and Alexander would never vote to do that. But if you want to move debate to the left, that would be amendment to propose.
Medicaid is a poor system because it mandates a state share of financing. And in a lot of states, legislators go out of their way to keep rates low so that only a few doctors participate.
Absolutely right. Medicaid is what you get when you compromise with the far right. It is on the face of it a disgrace to have “special” medical access for “poor people”, who then become the scapegoats for everything wrong with a shitty system. To my mind, Medicaid, like food stamps and public housing, is the kind of timid minimalist social policy that marks the line between “liberal” and “left” in American politics.
Alexander did not pursue racist policies when it politically suited him. For that, during the 1980s he had the reputation of being something of a moderate.
With the election of Bush in 2000, Alexander made a hard right turn as did others (hello Richard Lugar) that required them to sacrifice the integrity on a blatant and massive scale.
He is putting forward this figure of speech because the corporate media, which still considers him a moderate Republican, will give it more credibility than if it came from, say Jeff Sessions.
It is a dog-whistle tactic with some deniability. He can say, for example, “I only meant that it put poorer people in a ‘separate but equal’ system that isolates them from real healthcare.” He could say that, but he would be lying. And the Village would accept that at face value. It is just easier for a perceived Southern moderate to get away with this.