#icantbreathe and #blacklivesmatter have become omnipresent social media tags since the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the decisions not to indict the men who killed them. They are important statements about problems with our law enforcement system, but they also have important meanings in other discussions, like the assault currently being waged on the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Republicans and conservatives targeting the ACA is nothing new, and it’s natural that their attacks would increase in the wake of their 2014 electoral victories.
What is surprising are the Democrats pointing to the ACA as the reason for their losses, and their regret about prioritizing its passage. In discussing the momentum Democrats had after the 2008 elections, New York Sen. Charles Schumer recently said, “We took their mandate and put all the focus on the wrong problem – health care reform.” His speech was one part of a broad dissection of the 2014 election, focusing on Democratic losses in a certain part of the electorate, referred to by Schumer and message minded Democrats as “middle class voters.” Thomas Edsall of the New York Times refers to them perhaps more appropriately, and disturbingly, as “white Democrats,” the “white working class” or “whites without a college degree.”
These voters were a problem for President Obama as early as his primary against then Sen. Hillary Clinton. He won only 40 percent of white voters without a college degree in November 2008, and in 2014 only 34 percent voted for Democratic congressional candidates. Polls suggest that they do not like the ACA, and do not feel it helped them.
I have no problem with the numbers. My problem is that those numbers could mean many things. I would accept, and even agree, that the ACA should have been broader. I would accept that it should have been messaged better, particularly given that much of the “white working class” do or will benefit. I will not accept that passing the ACA was the wrong thing to do, because it devalues the 14 million people who have been helped. Since the majority of uninsured are non-white, it is akin to saying that the healthy lives of people of color don’t matter, or at least matter less than the votes of some white people.
Obviously, the tragedies in Ferguson and New York are on a very different level than a political speech about the ACA, but they are related. The health care system has some of the same biases as the law enforcement system. For the uninsured, asthma and obstructive pulmonary disease can suffocate as surely as a chokehold. We may never know their names, but their lives matter, and some of them have been saved by the ACA. When it is attacked, we need to remind people why it was the right thing to do, and why it should be expanded, not thrown overboard as part of a misguided quest to woo back some disillusioned voters.
Sometimes doing the right thing comes with a political cost, but as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointed out, they were elected “to do a job, not keep a job.” Sen. Schumer, and others, should keep that in mind if they hope to regain the majority someday.
