Groups Test Waters on Discussion of Race in Health Care Debate - washingtonpost.com

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By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 1:23 PM

In the debate over revamping the health-care system, there are the doctors and nurses, the insurance companies and industry lobbyists and the patients with preexisting conditions, among others. With so many interest groups, the noise is loud and getting louder.

Missing from the noise so far: the voices of minorities, who are disproportionately represented among the poor and uninsured and could profit the most from reform attempts, and who also represent the failures of the current system in that they are more likely than others to suffer from chronic illness such as diabetes.

Starting this week, however, those voices will become a larger part of the debate.

Leaders of black and Latino advocacy groups say they are becoming more forceful as the final drafts near because so many of their members favor reform, even though they had been reluctant to make race and ethnicity a central issue because the topic is so controversial.

"There are some people who would like to defeat this bill by tagging it to the issue of race," said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, agreed. "I tend to think that we could win this on the merits and the facts. I don't think we have to resort to race issues to get a common-sense and sound health-care reform," she said. "I think there are people who want to take it in that direction."

Their comments reflect an understanding among supporters of revamping the health-care system that focusing on racial disparities in health care could be a political loser, said Darrell M. West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "The White House seems to have shifted from the moral message to an economic one," he said. "Race always is a sensitive topic and . . . there's always a risk of misunderstanding and a backlash against it."

According to a recent Washington Post poll, there is already a wide racial gap in Americans' views on health-care reform, with minorities largely in favor of changing the health-care system and President Obama's handling of it. Fewer than four in 10 white people, however share each of those views, though much of this is probably because of partisan differences.

Those poll numbers are a reflection of the place race has had in the debate, said Anne Kim, director of economic programs at Third Way, a liberal policy think tank. Some of the traditional reasons Democrats have given for reforming health care, such as addressing racial disparities, "have been drowned out" by debate over big issues such as whether there should be a public option, Kim said. "There was just no bandwidth for those kinds of issues to be on the table."

But as the debate reaches its next phase, the minority advocacy groups are finding their place in the conversation by using their voter turnout operations to get supporters to put pressure on their members of Congress as a vote nears, said NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. "We're reminding [them] that we are here and that we will be at the polls next fall."

In recent weeks, his group has been highlighting the fact that African Americans and Latinos are also more likely to be uninsured than whites. According to 2008 Census figures, 10.8 percent of whites are uninsured, compared with 30.7 percent of Hispanics, 17.6 percent of Asians and 19.1 percent of African Americans. On Thursday night, the NAACP is launching a campaign called "880," referring to "the deaths of 880,000 people of color that would have been prevented if real health- care reform had been enacted in the last decade" with a town hall meeting in Washington. The 880,000 figure is from a study of health-care coverage in the 1990s by the American Journal of Public Health, Jealous said.

National Council of La Raza has also been upping its activity, pressing its members to call their congressional representatives and ask that all U.S. residents be covered by health-care reform. Some plans currently circulating wouldn't cover legal immigrants. Murguía said her group's members have made 5,000 calls in the past few weeks.

And La Raza, the NAACP National Voter Fund, the Campaign for Community Change, the United States Student Association and PowerPAC.org are rolling out a joint ad campaign this week -- the first directly targeting African Americans and Latinos. The print, radio and television ads will run in English and Spanish.

The African American narrator of the television ad says: "I'm not going to let special-interest politicians throw 46 million of us under the bus," using a common estimate of the number of uninsured Americans. "I'm not going to leave my grandkids' health in the hands of insurance companies that care more about profit than they do about everyday families. And as for the politicians, tell Senator Lincoln there needs to be room for all of us on this bus." As the narrator concludes a young Latina and her child attempt to board a bus that has closed its doors on them.

Senator Lincoln refers to Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), whom the groups are targeting along with senators in Florida, North Carolina and Louisiana, where the ads will air. The total buy for the ads in the four states will be between $250,000 and $500,000, a small fraction of the $82.5 million spent this year on health-care ads, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, which tracks political ad spending.

"Everything up until this point has really been preliminary skirmishes," said West, the Brookings Institution scholar. "Now is when the action really begins in terms of the House and the Senate."

Staff writer Ben Pershing and polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.