Racial tension in the healthcare arena is not new. I work in an urban hospital, and I have witnessed some incredible interactions over the years. I can guarantee that the fears we are seeing so openly now on the national stage have been played out locally for quite some time.
In the urban hospital, many patients express worries that someone else is getting the health care that they are supposed to be getting. There are important underlying fears here: 1) that there are limited resources; that we are going to "run out of health care" 2) the person who is getting treated is definitely undeserving, and 3) this person is undeserving due to race, class or immigration status.
Here’s just one example: I was admitting a gentleman who had both Medicare and Medicaid for his insurances due to permanent disability. As he overheard a conversation my coworker was having with a recent immigrant, he leaned in and whispered to me "You see, it’s because of those people that people like me can’t get insurance." I was too dumbfounded to respond. My guess is that he and his acquaintances have had a great deal of red tape headaches with Medicare and/or Medicaid, and that’s what was on his mind, but seeing an immigrant get any access to healthcare tapped into his fear, and he lashed out.
It’s important to point out here that in this urban hospital it’s primarily poor people accusing each other of being "undeserving." The racist idea of "there is always someone beneath me" is assimilated to the point at which many people, including people of color, look down on recent immigrants, and "blame them" for "stealing all the health care" as if it were a zero-sum game. This is true even with recent legal immigrants: there is no logic or rationality to thinking. There is no thinking at all – fear takes over.
The idea that the person who is "other" is undeserving has a long history in this country. It’s so ingrained into our culture that it crosses class lines. The idea is woven into coded language that many wealthier Americans use to talk about "welfare," and now they have simply moved that code to talk about "healthcare."
And what’s the point I’m making?? I guess the point is that if you still doubt that racial tension is underlying the healthcare debate, doubt no more.