The New York Times, in one more effort to paint the Southern states as hotbeds of racism, estimates that two-thirds of poor blacks and single mothers will be denied health insurance under Obamacare because the Southern states refuse to expand their Medicaid programs.
The Times adds that more than half of low-wage workers without insurance won’t get any, either.
Well down in the Times piece is this nugget: more than half of states in the United States have rejected Medicaid expansion, including Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, which are hardly Southern.
To make the charge of racism stick, the Times notes that 68% of poor blacks who are uninsured live within the 26 states, adding: “The disproportionate impact on poor blacks introduces the prickly issue of race into the already politically charged atmosphere around the health care law. Race was rarely, if ever, mentioned in the state-level debates about the Medicaid expansion. But the issue courses just below the surface, civil rights leaders say, pointing to the pattern of exclusion.”
Much farther down in the article, the Times acknowledges that supporters of Obamacare admit that covering 10% of the additional cost of Medicaid expansion would cripple some of the rural states refusing to expand.
State Senator Giles Ward of Mississippi, a Republican, was furious that his state was called racist, calling the charge “preposterous.” He added that the South’s demographics, with larger numbers of poor people, “you can argue pretty much any way you want.”
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