Scott Walker carries out Race Based Neo-Confederate Health Care Strategy.

By not expanding Medicaid (BadgerCare), Scott Walker put Wisconsin on a whole new "neo-confederate" path that will withhold health care from the states minority constituents and the working poor. It's been the southern states strategy for years. Could anyone really be comfortable with the red and orange area's in the map below showing poverty and the number of uninsured?

"Neo-confederate" is term that I believe is an apt description of our current Republican tea party.

Michael Lofgren, a more traditional Republican and former Reagan adviser, described it that way on All In with Chris Hayes. I've shortened the clip to the bare bones below, with Bush adviser Bruce Bartlett's comments as well:



The proof of this neo-confederate movement can be seen in the map below. Republican efforts to spread individualism and reduce government dependence has only resulted in more Americans without health care and on the edge of medical bankruptcy. This tough love agenda hasn't resulted in fewer Americans without health care or jobs, so what's the point?

Wisconsin is on the southern neo-confederate path to poverty and no insurance. Walker is fully on board:

"I'd like to have fewer people in the state who are dependent on the government."

Here's more from the NY Times:

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance. Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. 

Gladys Arbila, a housekeeper in Houston who earns $17,000 a year and supports two children, is under the poverty line and therefore not eligible for new subsidies. But she makes too much to qualify for Medicaid under the state’s rules. She recently spent 36 hours waiting in the emergency room for a searing pain in her back.