One of These Things is Not Like the Other

I was looking at the list of invitees to the White House’s forthcoming summit on health care reform. Do you notice anything interesting about the list?

There is precisely one woman – Speaker Nancy Pelosi – on the list of invitees. Twenty of the 21 invitees are men, with the vast majority (everyone except Charlie Rangel and James Clyburn) being white.

I’m not a hard charger for identity politics. I’d take a Senate full of the late, great, and much-missed Paul Wellstone (D-MN) over a Senate full of Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) every day and twice on Sunday.

Of the 45-ish-million people who are uninsured, most (79%) come from households with at least one worker, nearly one in five are children under 19 (76% of the uninsured are under 44), just over half are non-white, the vast majority (82%) work blue-collar jobs, with particularly high representation in the services, agriculture, and construction industries.

Women are hit hard by uninsurance with nearly one in five uninsured. But the uninsurance isn’t equally distributed: 13% of white women, 21% of Asian/Pacific Islander, 25% of African American women, 33% of American Indian/Alaska Native, and 41% of Hispanic women.

So, despite the fact that the burden of uninsurance falls heavily on blue collar families, on children, and on racial and ethnic minorities, the main leaders of the health reform summit are white, wealthy, male, and over 50.

Being married to a philosopher, I’ve absorbed some things. Like the capabilities approach (also, I am a big nerd and fan of Amartya Sen). Before you start rolling your eyes at what you might perceive as academic nonsense, hear read me out. So the capabilities approach deals with economics and measures well-being. One of the ten capabilities that Martha Nussbaum argues is should be supported by all democracies is affiliation. Affiliation entails not only nondiscrimination but also being able to imagine the situation of another.

When I consider the forthcoming summit, I doubt very much that very many of the people in the room can truly imagine the situation of the uninsured and working poor in America. I know the Democrats are saying this Summit represents hope for health care reform.

But hope isn’t a policy solution.

Thanks to the Kaiser Family Foundation for their amazing chartbooks.

Comments

[TDOM]

I would imagine that these men are better able "imagine the situation of the uninsured and working poor in America" than you might give them credit for. They may be white, but they are men and according to the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/200906_01.pdf)there were more men between the ages of 18-65 in 2008 without health insurance than women. So men are hit harder by uninsurance than women (18.6% men vs 15.3% women uninsured).

That said, there should be more women and minorities represented on this issue, but perhaps this is a case where old white men know simply more about... no, I won't even go there.

TDOM