We’ve heard it before. Conservative politicians complain about the federal government “overreaching” to fix national problems with damaging consequences in every region of America.
In the southern response to President Harry Truman’s civil rights speech in 1948, Rep. William Colmer (D-Miss.) declared attempts to abolish segregation were a “usurpation of the sovereign rights of the several States of the Union.” Segregation worked just fine in the South, many Dixiecrat politicians said, and the government had no right to force the region to support racial equality.
America is now debating whether all Americans have a right to affordable health care, and conservatives are dusting off the old playbook.
On Dec. 23, Texas Gov. Rick Perry urged other governors to “stand up to this unprecedented intrusion in to our lives and the rights of our citizens.” States should determine their own methods for providing coverage, and Texas’s system should be the model, Perry said.
But just as segregation led to vast inequities in economic, political and social opportunity in the South, health care quality is worst in Texas and other Southern states. Texas has the largest percentage of uninsured residents of any state in the nation at 25.2 percent, and eight of the 10 states with the highest percentage of uninsured are in the South, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
This lack of coverage has contributed to Southerners being the least healthy Americans in the nation. The South leads the United States in infant mortality and lowest life expectancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and a study by the Harvard School of Public Health, but Perry and other Southern politicians pay such statistics little mind.
In Southern and other conservative states, the political will to expand coverage does not exist. Governors like Perry oppose expanding Medicaid eligibility for low-income people and eschew the regulation of insurance companies that would drive down costs for those most in need. Leaving health care reform to the states is a prescription for inaction.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. Ensuring equal access to health care through strong action by the federal government is part of this arc.
The immorality of failing to reform a health care system that leaves many struggling to find affordable treatment could not be clearer.
Liberals in Congress refused to allow obstructionist Dixiecrats to hold civil rights legislation hostage. In protest, Strom Thurmond filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act, but after 24 hours and 18 minutes, the Senate passed the bill, which required the Justice Department to enforce suffrage for all Americans.
President Barack Obama has tried bipartisanship on health care, but conservatives are as opposed to reform as they were to civil rights. It is time to force a Republican filibuster of health care reform.
So, who wants to be the next Strom Thurmond?
Weinberg junior Jordan Fein can be reached at [email protected].
