Politics Magazine
This is a rather staggering statistic -- that nearly half of all Americans without health insurance live in one region of the country (the South). In September of 2013, before Obamacare was fully implemented, the South had 41.5% of uninsured Americans, but in June of 2014 that has risen to 48.9%.
While enough states in the three other regions of the country covered many of their poorer residents by expanding Medicaid, the solidly red states of the South did not -- and when you combine that with the fact that the South has a higher percentage of people living in poverty (or working for a very low wage), it means the South now has millions of people living without health insurance (or any chance of getting it anytime soon).
This should not surprise us. The Republican officials in the South, like the national GOP officials, run their GOP-controlled governments for the benefit of the rich and the corporations. They don't care about the poor (or even the middle class). They oppose the minimum wage (and refuse to raise it), believing employers should be able to pay as little as possible to workers (even if that is a poverty wage). They also believe health care is a product to be sold to those who can afford it, instead of a right of all citizens.
This prompts a question -- why do the people of the South (many of whom are poorly paid or in poverty, and have no health insurance) continue to elect Republicans to political office? Why do they keep voting against their own economic and health interests? There are two facets to the answer -- race and religion.
Regardless of what you may have been told (or just want to believe), there are still a lot of racists in the South. They abandoned the Democratic Party when President Johnson got the civil rights laws passed in the 1960s -- and the Republican Party welcomed them with open arms. And since that time the Republican Party in the South has championed policies that are anti-immigrant and anti-minority, giving those racist voters (who have morphed into the teabaggers) the illusion that a white-dominated America is still a possibility.
But the racists alone cannot control the Republican Party. They need the help of the religious fundamentalists, who control religion in the South. These fundamentalists are upset that their religious views are not elevated above those of other Americans. And the Republican Party has been effective in convincing them that they are the party of christianity, and fooled them into believing they can re-introduce teacher or administrator-led school prayers and force the teaching of creationism as science.
The teabaggers and the evangelicals together dream of replacing out democracy with a white fundamentalist christian theocracy -- and the Republican Party has convinced them that they can make that happen. The crazy part is that they could elect Republicans from now until doomsday, and that still would not happen. The First Amendment protects all religions (and those without religion) equally, and would prevent the establishment of any religion above all others. And the Fourteenth Amendment, along with the demographic population changes happening in the U.S., insures that the future of this country will be a multi-racial and multi-ethnic democracy -- and dominance by whites (even where it still exists) is going to be eliminated.
In other words, a majority in the South votes against its own economic and health interests for a pipe-dream -- an illusion kept alive by Republican propaganda. There is hope for the South though. Just like in other parts of this nation, each new generation in the South is less racist and less religious than the one that preceded it -- and someday the racism and religious bigotry that currently triumphs, will no longer make Southerners vote against their own best interests.
