The Undeserving

It is no accident that civility broke down in Congress when President Obama was discussing the access of immigrants to health care.  The most persistent and entrenched reason for opposing progressive change in America has been that “the undeserving” might benefit.  With health care reform, too, much of the opposition, at its core, comes from those who would rather have nobody benefit than to see benefits extended to groups they despise.

Behind most progressive policy is the notion “there but for the grace of God go I.”  Empathy for others carries the self-interested kernel that any one of us could have ended up in someone else’ position.  Compassion stops when it is beyond the imagination to project oneself into another person’s circumstances.   Someone in a situation that only idiots and scoundrels should end up in, must be an idiot or a scoundrel,  and deserves no support.  Of course, the more like us a person is, the easier it is to feel empathy.

In America we face the constant struggle to re-imagine the country we are part of.  A nation of Northern European religious outsiders became a country of masters and slaves, a country of refugees from hunger and persecution, a nation of opportunity for all European men, and then, increasingly, for all people of the world.  As each new culture has moved to become part of the American core, the majority has been forced to accommodate the change.  This has been a constant struggle, whether the newcomers were the Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, and Latinos, or the African-Americans and women who had been here from the earliest days of the country but excluded from achieving the American Dream as individuals.

The limited life experience and truncated imaginations of those who were “born on first and think they got a base hit” often leads to stereotypes that greatly distort who is in trouble in America.  As with many stereotypes, there is an element of truth in the idea that the poor and uninsured are different.  They are not an exact cross section; blacks and Hispanics are overrepresented.  But the greatest number of people in poverty and without health insurance are white.   46 percent of those who lack health insurance are non-Hispanic whites and 43 percent of those in poverty are as well.   

Even among poor children, where over-representation of people of color is greater than among other age groups, non-Hispanic white children are 31 percent of children in poverty.   Most of these non-Hispanic white children in poverty are from families headed by a single mother. 

Non-Hispanic white two-parent families are doing best.   That hardly seems a good reason, even for members of such families, to treat everyone else as outsiders.

Source: Census Bureau Income Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States, 2008, September , 2009. Note “other” is a residual category of unknown composition

Source: same as above

The defenders of self-reliance may fancy themselves as lonely fighters for old-time values.  As they put the screws on the uninsured and the poor, they should realize that they are particularly tough on "undeserving" children, and that most of those who need a safety net are not so different from them.  Of course, it does take a little bit of imagination.