What's the matter with white people? [View All]

[SpartanDem]

What's the matter with white people?
Too many believe -- incorrectly -- that healthcare reform helps "other people," not themselves
By Joan Walsh

Frank Rich's column "The Rage Is Not About Health Care" got a lot of attention this weekend. It ran through the examples of Republican overreaction and right-wing rage in response to the passage of healthcare reform – all of it well-covered in Salon -- and concluded the rage mainly stems from the fact that whites are about to become the minority in this country.

Rich isn't wrong (although calling last week's uprising a "small scale mimicry of Kristallnacht" was a little shrill). The "I want my country back!" rhetoric does reflect a mind-set in which one's country has been taken away by ... others. But in thinking about race this weekend, I got more out of a column by Ron Brownstein, which examined poll data showing that white voters -- wrongly -- tend to believe healthcare reform helped "other people," not themselves.

Even though the Obama administration tried to stress the bill's benefits to all families -- insurance for folks with preexisting conditions, restrictions on companies dropping you when you get sick, letting kids stay on parents' policies until they're 26, as well as subsidies that will mainly go to middle- and working-class families (the poor are already covered by Medicaid) -- a Gallup survey found that 57 percent of white respondents said that the bill would help the uninsured, and 52 percent said that it would improve conditions for low-income families. Only a third of whites thought it would benefit the country, and shockingly, only 20 percent thought it would benefit their family. (Nonwhites polled were more likely to say the bill would help their families.)

Those doubts were especially pronounced among white voters with less than a college education, Gallup found -- the group that most resisted candidate Obama in 2008. They're the least likely to say the plan would benefit the country, even though they're more than twice as likely to lack health insurance as college-educated whites. We can shake our heads at their ignorance, perhaps even racism, or we can try to understand the roots of their doubt. Brownstein points to a Stanley Greenberg poll that found these whites are reaching a tipping point that could send them even more enthusiastically toward Republicans this year. He also notes that among the 34 House Democrats who opposed the healthcare reform bill, 28 percent come from districts with a higher than average percentage of non-college educated whites in their districts.


http://www.salon.com/news/healthcare_reform/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/03/29/white_voters_and_health_care_reform