Structures of Resentment: On Feeling—and Being—Left Behind by Health Care Reform (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dissecting the politics of “Obamacare”: The role of distributive justice, deservingness, and affect
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
Political conservatives (vs. liberals) are commonly thought to oppose government-based policies that promote equal distribution of resources, preferring that resources be distributed based on merit. In a sample of American adults (n=436), distributive fairness perceptions, deservingness, and affective reactions related to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were examined to better understand the ideological differences in ACA attitudes. Participants completed measures of political orientation, ACA knowledge and attitudes, deservingness, distributive justice principles (i.e. need, equality, merit), anger, and sympathy. Identifying as politically liberal (vs. conservative) and greater knowledge on the ACA predicted greater ACA support. Preferences for the distributive justice principles of equality and need (but not equity) mediated the relation between political orientation and ACA attitudes. Further, conservatives perceived less deservingness and in turn experienced greater anger and opposition to the ACA. Additional exploratory analyses also suggest that the positive path between deservingness and ACA support is moderated by political orientation such that it is stronger among political liberals than conservatives. Implications of the ideological chasm in relation to the ACA are considered.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2017
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to reduce stark health inequalities by providing universal health insurance to all Americans and long-term authorised immigrants. Later regulations, however, gave the 50 U.S. states latitude to choose the degree of coverage for their constituencies. In this paper, we explore how interactions with these diverse systems of care contribute to the incorporation of immigrants into America, especially among the most likely to remain uninsured: the working poor. We uncovered a process in which immigrants' access to health coverage and care was informed by the procedural justice embedded in their interactions with representatives of the health care system. These interactions signalled to immigrants their deservingness in American society, operating as a system of incorporation in the most inclusive states and as a barrier to incorporation in the most exclusive ones. Repealing the ACA may exacerbate differences across states in access to health care among eligible immigrants and end the incipient transformation of the U.S. health care system into an agent of immigrant incorporation.
Fairness and the Politics of Resentment
Journal of Social Policy 07/2013; 42(03). DOI:10.1017/S0047279413000056 · 1.11 Impact Factor, 2013
The role of the emotions in the framing of welfare policies is still relatively underexplored. This article examines the role of resentment in the construction of a particular form of ‘anti-welfare populism’ advanced by the Coalition Government in the UK after 2010. We argue that UK political parties have appropriated the discourse of fairness to promote fundamentally divisive policies which have been popular with large sections of the electorate including, paradoxically, many poorer voters. In focus group research in white working class communities in the UK undertaken just before the 2010 General Election, resentments related to perceived unfairness and loss emerged as very strong themes among our respondents. We examine such resentments in terms of an underlying ‘structure of feeling’ which fuels the reactionary populism seen in ‘anti-welfare’ discourses. These promote increasingly conditional and punitive forms of welfare in countries experiencing austerity, such as the UK, creating rivalries rather than building solidarities amongst those who ‘have little’ and drawing attention away from greater inequalities. Journal of Social Policy 07/2013; 42(03). DOI:10.1017/S0047279413000056 · 1.11 Impact Factor
Decolonizing the U.S. Health Care System: Undocumented and Disabled after ACA
Health Tomorrow: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality, 2018
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) explicitly denies newly arrived documented and undocumented immigrants health insurance coverage, effectively making them the largest remaining uninsured segment of the U.S. population. Using mixed qualitative methods, our original research illustrates the health consequences experienced by uninsured, disabled undocumented immigrants as they navigate what they describe as an apartheid health care system. Critiquing the notion of immigrants as “public charges” or burdens on the system, our qualitative analysis focuses on Houston Health Action, a community-based organization led by and for undocumented, low-income disabled immigrants in Houston, Texas. Engaging a critical migration and critical disabilities studies framework, we use this valuable case to highlight contemporary contradictions in health care and immigration legislation and the embodied consequences of the intersecting oppressions of race, ability, immigration status, and health care access.
Unrequited Engagement: Misadventures in Advocating for Medicaid Expansion
American Anthropologist, 2018
Health reform in the United States is in peril. Although the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expanded health-care access to twenty million people, ongoing Republican attempts to dismantle the ACA make clear that these gains are extremely vulnerable. If the US Senate's Better Care Reconciliation Act had passed in June 2017, for example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that fifteen million Americans would have lost their health insurance by 2018 and twenty-two million by 2026 (CBO 2017a). Likewise, the CBO estimated that if the recently passed tax reform bills-which would eliminate the individual mandate of the ACA-are signed into law, then thirteen million Americans would lose their health insurance (CBO 2017b), premiums would increase by approximately 10 percent per year (CBO 2017b), and the federal deficit would increase by 1.5 trillion dollars (CBO 2017c)-a move that many health advocates suggest would reduce Medicaid coverage over the long run as Republicans seek to cut so-called entitlement programs. In this uncertain context, this essay is written with two primary aims. First, we turn an ethnographic gaze onto one of the major benefits of the Affordable Care Act: expanding Medicaid to low-income adults. Though the ACA is not perfect, and we analyze its faults at length in other places (Mulligan and Castañeda 2017), it is nonetheless important to take a public stand in favor of preserving the positive aspects of the law, including-and particularlymaintaining the expansion of Medicaid access to low-income adults. Based on our collective research experiences and the uniquely holistic approach of anthropology, we put human faces to the data to argue that Medicaid-facilitated access to health care saves lives. Conversely, we underscore that the absence of health coverage in the Medicaid "gap" leads to job loss, disability, and death.
What makes the politics of resentment flourish in Wisconsin and Louisiana
What makes the politics of resentment flourish in Wisconsin and Louisiana? In this paper, my purposes are (1) to outline four phenomena that nourish the politics of resentment; (2) to propose my own approach to ethnographic research that I will utilize in the future. I will document an ethnographic case study designed to provide deeper insight into the manifestation of public opinion in rural areas of Wisconsin. I will also study the politics of resentment in Lake Charles Metropolitan Area in Louisiana, which has a population of more than 200,000. I will use public opinion polls to complement these findings to identify broader trends in American society. This article looks to contribute to the emerging literature that argues for a wider adaptation of ethnographic methods within political science particularly as we grapple with anti-intellectualism and democratic erosions in the post-truth era. I hope to fill gaps in our knowledge of the politics of resentment by further operationalizing the multifaceted nature of the concept. The existing literature has not focused on how place, economic, racial, and cultural resentment interact and nourish one another in a perfect equilibrium to yield a politics of resentment. In this paper, I argue that the politics of resentment is made up of place, economic, racial, and cultural resentments. These four features are critical to a flourishing politics of resentment. I hope to fully explore these features of the politics of resentment though intensive ethnographic interviews with a small subset of people from Wisconsin and Louisiana. In future research, I hope to explore the role of recent cultural phenomena such as political correctness, critical race
Towards an Ethnography of the Uninsured: Gay Becker’s Work in Progress
Medical Anthropology 26 (4): 293-298., 2007
was innovative in placing the issue of the uninsured squarely at the heart of her analysis of the U.S. health care system. Becker's novel contribution lay in examining the lack of universal health care in the U.S. as a mode of governance that produced certain subjects-subjects whom the system trained to view themselves as undeserving of care. Interrogating the means by which such a system is normalized, she further showed how a fragmented and discontinuous health care safety net served to contain the problem of the uninsured by discouraging them from seeking necessary treatment.
Toward an Ethnography of the Uninsured: Gay Becker's Work in Progress
Medical Anthropology, 2007
Gay Becker's following article on the uninsured, submitted to Medical Anthropology before her untimely death in January 2007, was innovative in placing the issue of the uninsured squarely at the heart of her analysis of the U.S. health care system. Becker's novel contribution lay in examining the lack of universal health care in the U.S. as a mode of governance that produced certain subjects-subjects whom the system trained to view themselves as undeserving of care. Interrogating the means by which such a system is normalized, she further showed how a fragmented and discontinuous health care safety net served to contain the problem of the uninsured by discouraging them from seeking necessary treatment.