Heather McGee

But we see drained pool politics all over the agenda right now, right?

We see the administration with the Doge so-called department coming out early in its existence in January and saying,

The government is too woke.

We're going to freeze all federal grants and disbursements, sending chaos through the health care system, the hospital system.

Cancer studies are being paused in their tracks and sent into chaos because of this war on medical research, this war on the idea that government has a place and the sort of smokescreen for it, the emotional logic for it, is that our government has become too woke.

That's exactly right.

When the United States Supreme Court used a states' rights legal theory, right, whenever you hear a states' rights legal theory, you should be thinking about the long history of segregation and slavery.

But this was the Roberts Court who said, oh, no, the congressional mandate for expanding Medicaid so that, you know, real working class people making, you know, $30,000, $40,000 a year would be able to have Medicaid coverage.

said that that should be left to the states, right?

It shouldn't be a federal 50-state requirement.

And so as soon as that happened, you saw a new Mason-Dixon line of healthcare, where most of the former Confederate states refused to expand Medicaid, and most of the former Union states said, yeah, of course, we will do this.

And so we also see today that we just had a fierce debate in Washington and a shutdown over allowing a key part of the Affordable Care Act to be dismantled.

And so we're going to see premium increases for 22 million people.

There's also has been passed into law Medicaid reductions of a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.

that could lead to coverage losses for 10 million Americans.

And so this fight about health care has always been inflected with the core story of race and who belongs and who deserves.

Dr. King was right that injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.

But when it comes to systems in our society, if they're not universal—

then it's going to leave someone out.

And so, of course, the largest share of the uninsured in America are white people.