Column: Political ploy costs NC lives

The killing of Michael Brown in broad daylight has focused our nation’s collective attention on the differential treatment of black and white Americans by the criminal justice system. But a more insidious type of violence takes place within our healthcare system — and it kills more people than police brutality.

More than 300,000 North Carolinians at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level have been denied health insurance due to the state government’s refusal to expand Medicaid on the federal government’s dime.

Healthcare policy blog Health Affairs predicts the decision will result in 45,571 more people experiencing depression, 12,051 fewer women receiving mammograms and as many as 1,145 avoidable deaths in North Carolina.

Opponents of accepting federal funds are driven by purely political motives. Given the number of Republican governors who have switched course on their decision, the illogical and malicious nature of North Carolina’s political climate is even more apparent.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett recently joined Republican governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Arizona’s Jan Brewer in taking the federal funds to provide healthcare for his state’s poorest.

Charles van der Horst, an internationally known AIDS researcher at UNC and Moral Monday arrestee, said health practitioners are pawns in the state’s agenda.

“The governor and the Republican legislators, they want us to do the dirty work for them. I’m a physician, I’m supposed to keep people alive,” he said.

The Kaiser Family Foundation found that people of color are more likely to be uninsured than whites — proportions of 27 percent and 15 percent, respectively. Racism and classism are moving cogs within our everyday institutions.

We must reconceptualize our understanding of violence and address the many forms it takes — especially as it is perpetuated by the state. Voter suppression laws and attacks on access to reproductive healthcare are tools within the state’s vast arsenal.

Adaora Adimora, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at UNC, contends that violence is embedded in policy decisions that consistently disadvantage one group over another.

“The state’s refusal to expand Medicaid is the epitome of structural violence. Legislators, who in all likelihood have full access to healthcare themselves, have chosen to withhold this access to the many others in our state who have no access at all,” she said.

“And people will die because of their decision.”

Conservative, wealthy, white men have orchestrated state-sanctioned crime in North Carolina.

As far as I am concerned, Gov. Pat McCrory and N.C. Speaker of the House Thom Tillis, among others, have blood on their hands.