The Republican Party, egged on by overwhelmingly white teabagger extremists who helped the GOP take back the House in 2010, has made opposition to increased health insurance coverage soon to be provided by the Affordable Care Act their keystone domestic issue.
The teabagger-dominated House has voted 40 or so times to repeal the ACA, and has not voted even once for any bill that would provide coverage for the working poor who cannot qualify for Medicaid in most slave states.
There is blood on their hands, and it should never wash off.
This astonishing story (hat tip to Charles Pierce) by Monica Potts at The American Prospect shows generally, and in detail, how the life expectancy of low-education (and therefore) lower-class white women has been dropping precipitously.
In the richest nation in history.
Read the whole thing, really.
More, below.
The article interweaves the story of Crystal Wilson, a white high-school dropout in Arkansas who died, mostly due to poverty and the related lack of health insurance, at the age of 38, with reporting about the startling fact that life expectancy for poor white women like her has dropped by five years in the last two decades.
It is an unheard-of drop for a wealthy country in the age of modern medicine. Throughout history, technological and scientific innovation have put death off longer and longer, but the benefits of those advances have not been shared equally, especially across the race and class divides that characterize 21st-century America.
Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages, and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It’s killing them.
snip
The last time researchers found a change of this magnitude, Russian men had lost seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when they began drinking more and taking on other risky behaviors.
Crystal left high school in the 10th grade to marry 12-years-older Carl Wilson, none of her five siblings finished high school either.
Crystal had three miscarriages before giving birth to a daughter; Carl worked for the first few years of the marriage, but became disabled due to work-related injuries. The couple and their daughter Megan survived on Carl's $1,000-a-month disability, and lived in a trailer.
Megan got married in high school, but managed to graduate. She gave Crystal a grandchild, who she doted over.
Crystal was uninsured, and evidently unable to pay for treatment of her diabetes.
Crystal’s world was getting smaller and smaller and more sedentary. Everyone was worried about Possum (Carl), but Crystal’s own health was bad. She’d had a cystic ovary removed when Megan was 13, and about a year before her death she had a hysterectomy. The surgery was necessary after Crystal had started hemorrhaging, which was brought on by another miscarriage — something her family didn’t know about until the autopsy.
It’s unclear when she learned she was a diabetic. Megan thinks her mom might have heard it for the first time when she was pregnant with her, but Crystal never had regular medical care because she didn’t qualify for Medicaid as Possum did.
Twenty years of untreated diabetes is something no one with health insurance would do. Because it can kill you.
With untreated, unmanaged diabetes, her blood would have been thick and sticky — the damage would have been building for years — and it could have caused cardiac arrest or a stroke. (Crystal's older sister) Linda has her own explanation: “Her heart exploded.” And, in a way, it had.
The local school superintendent said the obvious stress of a poor woman having to care for her husband and her daughter, something that happens all too often in low-income families, had to affect Crystal's health:
I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe some of it might have been attributed to her system just being drug down from having to take care of Carl and Megan. Just everyday stress.
And the school's technology coordinator, who helped Megan graduate, agreed:
“It’s just horrible, you know? I don’t know if ‘horrible’ is the right word.” Julie puts her face into her hands. “The desperation of the times. I don’t know anything about anything, but that’s what kills them.”
There's a lot in the article about recent research on the dropping life expectancy for poor white women, including this telling political nugget:
In March, two researchers from the University of Wisconsin reported that women in nearly half of 3,140 counties in the United States saw their death rates rise during the same time period that Olshansky studied. The researchers colored the counties with an increase in female mortality a bright red, and the red splashed over Appalachia, down through Kentucky and Tennessee, north of the Cotton Belt, and across the Ozarks — the parts of the South where poor white people live. Location seemed to matter more than other indicators, like drug use, which has been waning.
The bright-red geographic range of too-early-dead white women corresponds with politically red parts of the country that voted most intensely against Obama and other Democrats who support increased access to affordable health insurance.
Many, maybe most, low-income white people there voted to help kill themselves, because they heard the white supremacy dog whistle that is the essence of today's Republican Party.
The sooner that self-destructive insanity ends, the better.