President Obama, Black History and The Rude Pundit

To the right of the President is Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Senate Minority Leader Mitch "McChin-less" McConnell of Kentucky.

As you all know, yesterday the President conducted his “Healthcare Summit”, a last attempt to compromise with Republicans and move forward on some much-needed healthcare reform. Why Democrats are trying to compromise with Republicans when they clearly have no interest in compromising with anyone is beyond me. My guess is that the purpose was to distinguish the President as the adult in the room and the Republicans as the greedy, petulant children. I make no effort to conceal my political leanings on this or any of my blogs. February is Black History Month. I suppose I could just write some sort of feel-good post linking you to a You Tube video of Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, but that seems to be what everybody does. I’d like to do something more constructive today. And so, in honor of Black History Month, I wish to provide you with some scary health statistics. (This information is brought to you courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control. I will compare the numbers for African Americans to the numbers for White people only. Remember: Blacks are approximately 12.4% of the U.S. population, whites are about 75%.)

Let’s start with the scariest disease and work our way down:

HIV/AIDS

• In 2007, the estimated number of white AIDS cases was 12,556, the number of black cases was 21,549. (This is the number of infections, not deaths.)
  

CANCER

• The death rates for all cancers for African American men are 36% higher than they are for white men.
• The death rates for all cancers for African American women are 17% higher than they are for white women.
• Although breast cancer is diagnosed 10% less frequently in African American women than White women, African American women are 34% more likely to die from the disease.

HEART DISEASE

• In 2006, African American men were 30% more likely to die from heart disease, as compared to non-Hispanic white men.
• In 2006, African Americans were 1.5 times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to have high blood pressure.

DIABETES

• On average, African Americans are twice as likely to have diabetes as Whites.
• When adjusted for age, African American women are more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than men or women in any ethnic group.

OBESITY

• African American obesity rates are 51% higher than whites.

ORAL CARE/HEALTH

• African Americans generally have among the poorest oral health in the United States. But we have company in this group: Hispanics,  American Indians and Alaska Natives also have poor oral health.
• The 5–year survival rate is lower for oral pharyngeal (throat) cancers among black men than whites (36% versus 61%).

You get the idea. In every disease category, African Americans are significantly worse off than anyone else. Disease begets more disease. The more you have been treated for various diseases, the less likely you are to be able to get affordable health insurance and/or care, the more you will spend on co-payments and deductibles, and the more likely you are to have claims denied for pre-existing conditions. So the stakes in this healthcare debate are high for all Americans – but they are even higher for us. These statistics are our past and our present – let’s not make them our future.

The Rude Pundit live Tweeted and extensively blogged about the Healthcare Summit. The Rude Pundit is not an African American, but he has a keen political eye and a direct, and often profane (hence the “Rude”), way of assessing a political situation. I think he sums it up well:

What Obama did yesterday will either go down as the naive last gasps of hope and change on health care reform or as a stroke of genius, providing cover for Democrats and resuscitating an effort that will progress from the degraded baseline of the current bill. With what seems to be honest-to-Christ momentum towards reconciliation, the Rude Pundit believes the latter. He thinks that Barack Obama calmly, gently, even, fucked the Republicans in the ass yesterday, his well-lubed thrusts just enough to make them comfortable until the very end.

Roll over and have a cigarette, Mr. President. You’ve earned it.

More on Race and Abortion…

Sigh.

I’d particularly draw your attention to the comments made by Spellman College women’s history Professor Beverly Guy-Sheftall:

“To use racist arguments to try to bait black people to get them to be anti-abortion is just disgusting…These one-issue approaches that are not about saving the black family or black children, it’s just a big distraction…Many black people don’t know who Margaret Sanger is and could care less.”

At least somebody has some sense.

Feministing also covered this. A writer on the community board noted that this billboard is especially insulting to black women and children because it “animalizes them” and “assert[s] that black women have no control over our own bodies and that we’re somehow intellectually weak enough to be controlled by the so-called eugenics-crazed poor-black-baby-eaters, aka Planned Parenthood.”

And here is another interesting piece on the Abortion/Eugenics thing.