Strange But True

as Bush and the GOP have taken the Dixie social model nationwide for several years now

Not just the social [services] model.

..but the land-use model, the environmental model, the labor relations model, the tax regime...

The future of America: Dothan, Alabama, from sea to shining sea.

As an expatriate Southerner (raised in a Baptist household in Tennessee but a resident of New York for nearly two decades), I'd like someone to ask Republican policy makers, such as the vile Haley Barbour, a simple question: if you're so pro-life, why aren't you doing more to save the lives of children who succumb to illnesses because they have no healthcare coverage? Here's a follow-up: would you advocate paying higher taxes to guarantee universal coverage for children? Surely Jesus wants you to ensure that innocent, chronically ill children are looked after . . . didn't He claim, if I recall my Sunday School lesson accurately, "Suffer the little children to come unto me?" Surely thousands of sick children have as much a "right to life" as a blastocyst.

During my years among the Southern evangelicals, I discovered that they have absolutely nothing to say about providing proper healthcare for all children, especially the poor, who, as today's Times piece shows, have virtually no recourse. And if I remember my Bible correctly, that level of hypsocrisy was one of the sins that Jesus vehemently railed against throughout His ministry.

more disgraceful bullshit from jabba the hack. There is no evidence, none, which suggests the two things are related. Your average hack will at least try their hand at contriving some kind of justification for issuing an evidence free allegation like this. You simply assert that it is the case confident that most of your readers are so dumb as to find crude post hoc arguments compelling. Shameful.

What Medicaid cuts are you talking about? These?. Also, any evidence that social spending was a key determinant of infant mortality would help make this post less nonsensical.

despite our American proclivity for spending more on health care than any other country, we have a very high infant mortality rate.

And yet you imply we should spend more? I don't understand. Are there no other factors at play? Come on Matt, you're better than this.

Re: During my years among the Southern evangelicals, I discovered that they have absolutely nothing to say about providing proper healthcare for all children

I have heard some such people declare that Christian physicians and hospitals shoudl ismply provide care for free for the porr, and they are genuinely puzzled that church-affliated hospitals (especially Cathiolic ones, since everyone knows the Vatican is richer than God) are not already doing so.

And yet you imply we should spend more? I don't understand.

Of course you don't.

Far too much of the money we spend on health care goes to the absurd levels of private bureaucracy necessary to determine who is covered for what. Far more goes to giving indigent patients the emergency care they ultimately receive in lieu of preventive care. Ergo: we don't save a dime, yet more people die.

Three sentences--not too hard for anyone with a functioning brain to grasp.

The Americn south hasmoved from a slave economy to a banana republic, replete with the usual religiosity and bigotry.

Far too much of the money we spend on health care goes to the absurd levels of private bureaucracy necessary to determine who is covered for what. Far more goes to giving indigent patients the emergency care they ultimately receive in lieu of preventive care. Ergo: we don't save a dime, yet more people die.

And even more is spent on futile end-of-life care. Things such as massively expensive treatments on dying people that will at best prolong life for a few months or, more likely, weeks, when both the chances of long-term survival and the patient's quality of life are zero.

I bet you most of those dead infants are black. That's why the Southerners don't care.

More Dixie bashing!! Especially Texas bashing!!

I love this blog.

if you're so pro-life, why aren't you doing more to save the lives of children who succumb to illnesses because they have no healthcare coverage? Here's a follow-up: would you advocate paying higher taxes to guarantee universal coverage for children?

I'm not a Republican policy-maker, not even a Republican (shudder!), but I am a fairly anti-tax Evangelical Christian so i'll answer from my own point of view. To the extent that gov't intervention is the last resort, the sole line of defense against babies dying, then I support it. But I don't think it's a very good long-term solution.

I'm willing to gamble my Libertarian street cred just long enough to acknowledge that government social services can have a stopgap benefit. But in the long run government transfers engender a culture of passivity and entitlement. Private charity, a great deal of it from churches, should be filling this need in the long run. To be fair, even some "right-wing" Evangelical churches do a good job of taking Jesus' teachings about social justice to heart. The difference is that private charity can address people's needs holistically, in a way that the State cannot and should not do. (Yeah, I believe in a certain amount of separation of Church and State, as I take those terms.)

So yeah, I'm definitely not Haley Barbour, but hopefully I can offer a perspective that fosters dialogue rather than stereotyping what all Christians or all conservatives think.

Oh, Jesus! This is bad news for those of us who have spent our lives concerned with the welfare of the American South and its people--as opposed to, say, those who like to use the South as a whipping boy to score cheap political points. Alas, Matt, with this posting you've joined the Tom Schaller Rogue's Gallery. What "Dixie social model" are you talking about? I realize that most of what you know about the South is over fifty years out of date [I still remember you actually thinking V. O. Key's 1949 *Southern Politics* was an authoritative guide to *present-day* southern politics], but your wilful ignorance here is disturbing. The same NYT article you cite, after all, points out that southerners, white and black, have been successfully working for years to get infant mortality [especially the scandalously high rates among southern blacks] down to at least national norms [themselves nothing to write home about by developed-world standards], and reports that Mississippi [!!!] officials are "shocked" at the recent reversal of what had been a hopeful trend. If your notion of the "Dixie social model" had any validity, that would be hard to imagine; in the Mississippi of the 1960s [which I'm old enough to remember] officials wouldn't have given a damn. Nowadays--if for no other reasons than that black folk have the vote, and use it--those people do give a damn--as do many of us who work hard at trying to get other people to care. I teach the History of the American South at a well-known, and well-heeled, private southern university, and am taking a break from reading a set of student papers dealing with southern poverty, a central theme of my course. To a person, my students deeply, deeply care about these problems, and I feel that by sending them out into the South I'm doing a small bit to make this a better place for everyone who lives here. None of them knows that there's a "Dixie social model"; what they know is that there are *alternative* southern social models, and that they can, and should choose the best one. The South has changed a lot since the heyday of the "social model" to which you imagine us still wedded; most of its people are metropolitan, and if it were independent it would have the third largest GDP on earth. More importantly, it contains over a third of the American electorate--and a highly diverse third at that. Treating the place as some sort of backwater may be satisfying to the denizens of that D.C. apartment building you all seem to live in, but it does neither the South nor the country any real good.

David,
Your points are cogent and coherent, which is why they will be dutifully ignored. Matt can't help making use of any available cudgel to bash the South (a region he is totally ignorant of mind you) but even he should be able to figure out from the article that cuts in Medicaid are only one possible contributing factor, and far from the proximate cause. It's a complicated problem, but simple caricatures are polemically useful.

O for heavens sakes. Matt made a perfectly good point, just one of the many statistical indications that the South lags behind Northern urban abilities to raise children and make a good living, and we get this blather about "alternative Southern social models".

But it's plain from what happened in New Orleans that the alternative southern social model is to give the poor as little as possible and leave them behind. Combine that with a system where money buys political power, mix well with Justice Department efforts to scare away or disqualify black voters, and you have exactly the results southern voters hoped to get when they voted for Bush.

The problems of the South can't (and never could) be explained by a lack of money. In our lifetimes the government has spent billions there on the war industries, big universities, highways and disaster relief, and certainly hundreds of billions worth of oil was pumped from Louisiana and Texas, while Piedmont textile mills were protected from foreign competition, agriculture was subsidized, and Americans paid more for sugar and rice.

The problem in the South is simply a lack of character, and proclaiming themselves 'Pro-life' while they vote in the the Pro-death candidates is just one symptom.

Your points are cogent and coherent, which is why they will be dutifully ignored.

I re-read it four times trying to figure out where the real disageement was other than tone.

"I'm willing to gamble my Libertarian street cred just long enough to acknowledge that government social services can have a stopgap benefit. But in the long run government transfers engender a culture of passivity and entitlement. Private charity, a great deal of it from churches, should be filling this need in the long run."

EOC,
I appreciate where you're coming from. I'd suggest that the government only steps in when social needs _are not_ already being met. If they were being adequately addressed by the private sector or charity, then...the need wouldn't be there. In other words, what's the solution when, as is apparently the case, private charity isn't enough? If they should be filling this role, how do we get them to do so?

Re: And even more is spent on futile end-of-life care.

Please define "futile end of life care". In my extended family at least none of the dying ever got anything particularly "heroic". No artificial life support even. Just palliative care. But even that's hugely expensive. My father in his last two months ran up about $60K in hospital bills (and this was in 1991) but, again, nothing extraordinary was done for him.
Sorry, I'm a bit skeptical that we are really spending a lot of money on "useless" care unless treating the dying like human beings is "useless" in your definition. If you want to institute compulsory euthanisia or simply throw them out in the streets to save a buck or two you won't find me on trhat bandwagon.

Re: Private charity, a great deal of it from churches, should be filling this need in the long run.

You are an example of the type of Christian I mentioned above. You simply cannot grasp the enormity of the healthcare bill. Every church in the USA, including the putatively rich Catholic Church, would be bankrupt in a month if required to support the healthcare system. This is just way, way, way too big for "charity". And please look past our borders: every other sane and sensible counrty on the planet (many of them more anciently Christian than the US) has a national healthcare system and one that (minor and frictional problems aisde) works quite well. We are so behind the world on this! It's almost as bad as if, for reasons of stubborn ideology, we were all using outhouses still while the rest of the world had indoor plumbing.

JonF:
Most of that money spent on health care goes to 1)administration and 2)patent protected medicine. Cut out those two and it becomes very much more manageable by charity. You'd just have to find new jobs for all the drug reps and medical bureaucrats.
Matt: Just as long as you don't swallow the line at Reality Based Community (http://www.samefacts.com/archives/health_care_/2007/04/wilful_murder.php
where he touts a program that is (going by its name--Cary Christian Center) religious charity and not government as a Medicaid program that works. In fact it's a good example of Christian charity at work, not governmental program, doing everything that a governmental program is supposed to do, with one crucial exception: use our tax money.

Dothan, Alabama, from sea to shining sea

Heh. The most regrettable bit of a regrettable drive to Florida.

My sister-in-law had to delay one of her pre-natal ultrasounds because of a classic catch-22: her husband's new employment-based insurance hadn't kicked in, and Medicaid wouldn't cover the gap. Yes, that's in the South.

PseudoNC--Actually, that's how it works in most places, including North Carolina and most points north.

Hmm, anyone who has to drive through 'Bama to get to Florida from Carolina is...regrettable. I might even say, a good instance of Southern education at work. But fortunately, having spent most of my life in the South, I know better. I know that's not Southerners drive. That's how ferblundjete Northerners drive.

God do southern people have a talent for taking umbrage & being offended at exactly the wrong things (and I say this as a Texan)

Consider the fact that current infant mortality rates for blacks in Mississippi is now 17 percent! That's between Bahrain & the Kingdom of Jordan for christsakes.

For comparison consider that the infant mortality rate for all the U.S., even the good parts, is 6.9 percent. Not only is that higher than all of our fellow "developed" states like Canada, Netherlands, Belgium, Austrlia, Denmark, France etc. but is also higher than dirt poor CUBA! (6.45), Cuba...that little teapot despotia off the coast of Florida, the one who's chief exports are cinged dirt & hungry tummy aches, the one with a GDP lower than some american houses, they are somehow able to keep their younglings alive & breathing better than us "the richest country in the world"

I have no idea what's caused the spike in death, but I'm sure Mississippi's world class civil service & historically noble treatment of it's black population are not factors in the least.

But fortunately, having spent most of my life in the South, I know better. I know that's not Southerners drive. That's how ferblundjete Northerners drive.

That's driving to the Panhandle, kishnevi. Y'know, the bit of Florida that's in Central Time.

Re: Cut out those two and it becomes very much more manageable by charity.

Sorry, but I see healthcare as a basic right and not something that shouLD be provided by "charity". Charity is for emergencies: your house burns down, or a hurricane strikes. Something like that. The necessities of life are part of the basic right to life we all have and we should not have to beg for them. (And if it's somehow demeaning and emasculating to have to accept such things from a government bureaucrat why isn't it just as bad to have to accept them from a church bureaucrat?)

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