When it comes to right-wingers and the Affordable Care Act, biology and race are destiny. That’s the word from lefty pundit Amanda Marcotte, who argued in a Thursday column for Talking Points Memo that the “fight against Obamacare has been about needling the gender- and race-based resentments of the conservative base.”
“One of the unspoken but heavily insinuated arguments against Obamacare is that it’s a way for the federal government to steal health care from white people and give it to black people,” declared Marcotte. “You can see why people don’t say these things out loud in public, but the eyebrow-wriggling and hinting has been strong throughout this debate.”
Marcotte asserted that the right’s “gender-baiting” regarding Obamacare has been less subtle: “Ever since the HHS announced that contraception would be covered as co-pay-free preventive service, conservative media has gleefully portrayed the ACA as a program to give hot young sluts an opportunity to screw on the public dime.”
From Marcotte’s column (bolding added):
Trying to contrast the ACA with the [C]onstitution, [lawyer Michael] Carvin characterized the ACA as “a statute that was written three years ago, not by dead white men but by living white women and minorities.”
It’s startling to see an Obamacare opponent so bluntly characterize efforts to destroy the law as a way to preserve white male privilege in this way, much less taking it so far as to suggest the privileges of dead white men count for more than the needs of living women and people of color. But it shouldn’t be. The race- and-gender-based opposition to the ACA has been baked into the fight against it from the beginning…
…[T]he conservative fight against Obamacare has been about needling the gender- and race-based resentments of the conservative base in an effort to demonize Democratic efforts to create universal health care.
Ugly racial attitudes influenced the opposition to Obamacare in two major ways: Hostility to the black President that signed it into law and hostility to the black people who might get better healthcare through it...[Opponents] whip out the standard conservative talking points that have racially loaded implications built right into them: “States’ rights,” “welfare queens,” loaded warnings about the supposed wave of laziness about to crest over our nation. All these ideas are rooted in our nation’s history of racism…and the way that conservatives lean on these ideas now suggest that one of the unspoken but heavily insinuated arguments against Obamacare is that it’s a way for the federal government to steal health care from white people and give it to black people…
…Research has shown that negative attitudes about black people increase hostility to health care reform…Research has found that white people with high racial resentment, regardless of their opinion on Obama, view health care reform as a giveaway to lazy black people. You can see why people don’t say these things out loud in public, but the eyebrow-wriggling and hinting has been strong throughout this debate.
The gender-baiting, in contrast, has been way more explicit. Ever since the HHS announced that contraception would be covered as co-pay-free preventive service, conservative media has gleefully portrayed the ACA as a program to give hot young sluts an opportunity to screw on the public dime…
Arguably, race and gender anxieties are the reasons that healthcare reform, which would otherwise be a dry economic issue, has been such an ugly fight in this country. Healthcare is about bodies, after all. Racism and sexism are about a lot of things, but bodies are a big part of it, and whether or not people should have unequal status based on what bodies they have. Granting white and male bodies better care, on average, that female bodies and bodies of people of color get is a major way to preserve these kind of racial and gender hierarchies.
