Well, since the general assumption about me right now is that I'm against Medicaid for poor people, let me explain a couple things.
My siblings and I grew up in another part of the world where the difference between poverty and just above the poverty level meant the difference between having just barely enough to eat and not having anything to eat at all for days. When we were little, most of the time we'd have nothing but rice and salt to eat. Every once in a while, our parents would tell us to keep sleeping throughout the day because there wasn't anything to eat at all.
So, having rice and salt was just barely good enough to keep us going. If I was someone standing on the outside and seeing 70% of a group of people consistently having just barely good enough to survive for another day and I point it out saying there's something wrong here, am I against providing food for these people at all? Of course not. Just barely good enough is what we should have as a safety net, not something that people should be "used to".
That's how I see medicaid. It's a just barely good enough healthcare and should be viewed as a safety net system, not something that people should use for life. When I pointed out these statistics, it was not my intention to deny people medicaid. In fact, I celebrated when my home state decided to expand medicaid as part of the Obamacare package. If anything, we ought to increase the quality of medicaid.
It's not that I mind people using medicaid as a safety net. It's that I see something seriously wrong when 70% of births given in an entire group of people use medicaid. Again, it's a safety net program. It's like using your parking brake every single time you want to brake on the highway. What's worse, if 7 out of 10 cars on the highway use parking brake to slow down on the highway.
Why am I hammering these points? Because for decades we've been repeating the same lines as reasons to why the poverty level among black people is so disproportionately high. The high numbers of children born without fathers, the high incarceration rates, the gangsta looks in black pop culture, the insanely popular rap artists whose careers are to demean women and promote violence, etc. I think all of those things are related.
But god forbids if I say anything about it.
Anyway, I've said all I can. If you think continuing to use the exact same lines as the last several decades that have proven to not work at all, then by all means go ahead. Or people within the black community can begin admitting that there is something seriously wrong that isn't being addressed by pretty much anybody, probably out of fear of being labeled as a racist.
I was at least hoping for an insightful read cuz I'm not being disingenuous I really don't "get it." A small part of me thought you might understand since some of your tastes are outside of mainstream black culture as well.
