March 22, 2010     New America Media

Moments after House passage of the landmark health care reform bill, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele and House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner loudly sounded the war drums. Both pointed out three obvious and ominous facts. The bill passed by the narrowest of narrow margins. Americans are as deeply divided as ever on health care reform, or even whether there should be health care reform. The third point both made is the most ominous. They vowed to fight hard to repeal the law. They bank on a swell of public anger to punish the Democrats by plunging their numbers in the House and Senate in the November mid-term elections. 

This political Armageddon scenario would be a disaster for the Democrats. It would be a catastrophe for blacks and Latinos.

 Under the reform law, the promise is that more than 30 million uninsured will get coverage. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that blacks and Hispanics make up nearly half of the uninsured. But widely expanded coverage is as yet only a promise which, even if the GOP saber rattle against the law turns out to be just so much hot air, is scheduled to be kept years down the line. 

In the meantime, millions of middle-class, and especially poor, minorities must watch and wait for coverage to begin. There's no wait on the crisis that many blacks and Latino uninsured face. 
They are far more likely than the one in four whites who are uninsured to experience problems getting treatment at a hospital or clinic. This has devastating health and public policy consequences. 

According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, uninsured minorities are far more likely than whites to suffer higher rates of catastrophic illness and disease, and are much less likely to obtain basic drugs, tests, preventive screenings and surgeries. They are more likely to recover slower from illness, and they die much younger.

 Studies have found that when blacks and Hispanics do receive treatment, the care they receive is more likely to be substandard than that of whites. 

Reports indicate that even when blacks and Hispanics are enrolled in high quality health plans, the racial gap in the care and quality of medical treatment remains. 


Blacks and Hispanics have far greater incidences of all major medical ailments than whites. Even when they can pay for medical coverage, they can be excluded from coverage if afflicted with these medical maladies. The health care reform law forbids private insurers from barring anyone with preexisting conditions. But while the language of the law clearly spells out the prohibition, much depends on how aggressively government agencies monitor and enforce penalties on private insurers who refuse to cover, or find endless dodges and subterfuges to weasel out of covering, those with major illnesses.

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