Legislation: Still believe in post-racial politics? Read the health care bill. It's affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.
President Obama is on the record as being officially opposed to reparations for slavery. But as with other issues, you have to sift through his eloquent rhetoric and go beyond the teleprompter to get at what he really means.
His opposition to reparations is based on the fact they don't go far enough. In a 2004 questionnaire, he told the NAACP, "I fear that reparations would be an excuse for some to say, 'We've paid our debt,' and to avoid the much harder work."
Never mind there are those who thought we apologized at Gettysburg and that an African-American president is a recognition of the hard work that has been done.
At a press conference with minority journalists last fall, candidate Obama was pressed for more detail on his reparations position. He said he was more interested in taking action to help people who were just getting by. Because many of them are minorities, he said, that would help the same people who would benefit from reparations.
"If we have a program, for example, of universal health care, that will disproportionally affect people of color, because they are disproportionally uninsured," Obama said.
This may be a goal of Obama's health care plan: the redress of health care disparities on the basis of race and the punishment of those believed to be responsible, such as greedy doctors who perform unnecessary tests and procedures and greedy insurance and drug companies lusting for profits.
In his health care plan published during the campaign, it was written that Obama and Biden will "challenge the medical system to eliminate inequities in health care by requiring hospitals and health plans to collect, analyze and report health care quality for disparity populations and holding them accountable for any differences found."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeated this when she addressed the NAACP this month, saying: "It is a moral issue for our country to reduce health disparities, whether in diabetes, asthma, heart disease, cancer and HIV/AIDS." Excerpted. For more of this article go to : http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=483402