Minority groups gear up to push for health care reform

Minorities are so far missing from the cacophony of voices - including doctors, insurers, industry lobbyists, and patient advocates - in the health-care reform debate, the Washington Post reports, even as they are "disproportionately represented among the poor and uninsured and could benefit the most from reform, and who are more likely than others to have chronic illnesses such as diabetes. They are symbols of the failures of the current system. Starting this week, however, with a new campaign and new ads, their voices will become a larger part of the debate. Leaders of black and Latino advocacy groups say that because so many of their members favor health-care reform, they are becoming more forceful as the final drafts near, even though they are reluctant to make race and ethnicity a central issue." 

"But as the debate reaches its next phase, the minority advocacy groups are finding their place in the conversation, using their voter-turnout operations to get supporters to pressure members of Congress as a vote nears, said NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. 'We're reminding [them] that we are here and that we will be at the polls next fall'" (Washington Post, 10/8).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.