Survey finds that racial attitudes influence the tea party movement in battleground states
A new University of Washington survey found that among whites, southerners are 12 percent more likely to support the tea party than whites in other parts of the U.S., and that conservatives are 28 percent more likely than liberals to support the group.Not all tea baggers are racists, but it is an attitude that runs deep through the movement. As is loads of strange conspiracy theories - many birthers belong to the tea party - and willful ignorance when it comes to what the recently passed health care reform was supposed to achieve, A majority of Americans still believe the uninsured are doing just fine
"The tea party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race,"said Christopher Parker, a UW assistant professor of political science who directed the survey.
It found that those who are racially resentful, who believe the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks, are 36 percent more likely to support the tea party than those who are not.
Indeed, strong support for the tea party movement results in a 45 percent decline in support for health care reform compared with those who oppose the tea party. "While it's clear that the tea party in one sense is about limited government, it's also clear from the data that people who want limited government don't want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care,"Parker said.
It is therefore more than a little dismaying to read, in the latest issue of the journal Health Affairs, that the public still doesn't understand what it means to go without health insurance. (A subscription is required to read the full text.) A team of Harvard researchers (one of whom, Tara Sussman Oakman, is now a program analyst at the department of Health and Human Services) compared poll data from 1999 and 2009 on the question of whether the uninsured were able to get necessary health care. In 1999, 55 percent said they were. In 2009, 58 percent said they were.
This perception is incorrect. The authors of the Health Affairs article point out that a series of reports released between 2001 and 2004 by the Institute of Medicine, a nonprofit health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, clearly established that. People who lack health insurance, one 2002 report found, are more likely to go without cancer screening; do not receive sufficient care for chronic diseases like diabetes to prevent blindness and amputation; do not acquire sufficient medicine to treat diseases like hypertension and HIV infection; and receive insufficient care following a heart attack or other traumatic event.
If these findings sound familiar, that's because they were repeated time and again in press coverage of the health reform bill. One study calculated that nearly 45,000 annual deaths within the adult nonelderly population were associated with a lack of health insurance. Another put it, more conservatively, at 18,000. These estimates are necessarily imprecise, but even Megan McArdle, the Atlantic's libertarian business and economics editor, had to concede at the end of a tendentious March column pooh-poohing such findings ("Myth Diagnosis") that expanded health-insurance coverage "improves outcomes among certain vulnerable subgroups, like infants and patients with HIV."
Anyone who believes the uninsured enjoy sufficient access to health care probably has not been paying much attention to the news.
