White House tailors minority health care pitch (brags about all the 'free stuff')

politico ^ | 7/26/12 | REID J. EPSTEIN

 Barack Obama tends to skim lightly over the details of his health care law in speeches.
But his administration has a far more specific pitch to black and Hispanic audiences.

The message: Blacks and Hispanics, among whom uninsured rates are significantly higher than among whites, stand to benefit disproportionately under the health law, gaining access to free preventive care and other services that will help reduce existing health care disparities. The sustained outreach from the White House aims to make voters eligible for new benefits aware of them and how to get them.
Obama’s staff has invited groups of black journalists and publishers to the White House for health care briefings with senior officials and conducted traveling policy road shows in black and Hispanic neighborhoods across the country. On the day the Supreme Court upheld Obama’s health law, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett held an on-background conference call for black reporters.
Obama rarely emphasized specific benefits for blacks and Hispanics as he pushed his law through Congress, focusing instead on its benefits for the general populace. And the law itself includes only a smattering of programs designed to address racial disparities in health care — even though 22 percent of African Americans and 32 percent of Hispanics are uninsured, compared to 14 percent of whites, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data.
As his campaign leans heavily on repeating 2008’s historic margins and turnout from black voters, months of White House outreach on the Affordable Care Act could help rally African Americans in November. While the president polls far better among blacks and Hispanics than GOP challenger Mitt Romney, every vote matters in such a tight race.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said the appeals are key to boosting black turnout in swing states such as Florida and Ohio, and he’d like to see even more of them.
“It is a rallying call and it would help excite the African-American vote because this is something that African Americans truly care about,” Cummings said. “If there is one piece of legislation that I have voted for that I hear mentioned most is the Affordable Care Act. It is just amazing to me, you know, I think about my constituents, if they didn’t watch the news, would be shocked that there’s so much opposition to it.”
To general audiences and in televised speeches, Obama frames his signature policy achievement as a protection for the middle class against insurance companies that would otherwise bleed them dry. At the National Urban League in New Orleans Wednesday, he highlighted popular provisions in the controversial law — children staying on their parents’ health care plans until they turn 26, an end to insurers’ discrimination against sick people, lower prescription drug prices for senior citizens and “30 million Americans without health insurance” who “will finally know the security of affordable care.”
To black audiences, his aides also offer a more comprehensive focus on the law’s details and how they will reduce inequalities in care.
Jarrett ticked through Obama’s Affordable Care Act talking points during a regional African American Policy Forum at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
“Given the health disparities, it will disproportionately benefit the African-American community,” Jarrett said at the July 13 event, at which she was the featured speaker.
“So many folks in our community, and you know people who do this, use the emergency room as their primary care. That is not good. You need a primary care physician who you go to see on a regular basis who provides you with preventive care. So under the Affordable Care Act, the cost of that preventive care is free,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting.
“So no more excuses for not going in for those checkups, whether it’s a mammogram, or prostate testing, or, we know that, for example, asthma is so prevalent in the black community among our children. You need to take your children in for those regular checkups and know that it’s going to be covered and you’re not out of pocket,” she added during the discussion, which was moderated by satellite radio host Joe Madison, known to his listeners as “The Black Eagle.”
Jarrett also cited the reluctance of Southern GOP governors to support the health law.
“If you don’t have insurance currently, we’re going to subsidize it through exchanges around the states. You may have been hearing recently that some of the Republican governors, particularly the Southern Republican governors, are talking about not expanding Medicare, which the Affordable Care Act provides for them to do,” she said, apparently referring to Medicaid. “We think that they should, but we’re also going to set up a federal exchange that allows people who don’t have health insurance to have it and have it in an affordable way.”
The White House declined to make Jarrett available for an interview.
“The health care law will help every American by reducing costs, ending the worst insurance company abuses and extending coverage to millions of Americans who have gone without insurance,” White House spokesman Nick Papas said. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that administration officials discuss provisions of the law that will benefit the audiences they are addressing.”
But Florida GOP strategist Rick Wilson said Jarrett’s words show the health law is geared more toward eliminating racial disparities than helping the middle class.
“They sold the Affordable Care Act largely as, ‘We’re going to keep middle-class families from having catastrophic non-covered expenses and we’re going to help average, everyday Americans.’ She has a very specific race-based message, she’s playing to her audience at Morgan State,” Wilson said. “It plays to the race-driven mindset of a lot of these people in the Obama administration who look at the entitlement state as a way to address racial disparities.”
Chip Saltsman, who ran Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign, said the right will seize on Jarrett’s words as evidence that Obama’s health care reforms are not directed toward the middle class.
“Am I shocked that a senior adviser to the president would go to Baltimore and pander to a town hall to try and get votes for the president? No,” Saltsman said. “Neither will I be shocked that after hearing her remarks, a lot of conservatives are going to say, ‘I told you so.’”
Romney frequently attacks the health care law with a warning that some voters will be attracted to “free stuff” he says Obama has offered them.
“Your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this,” Romney told donors this month in Montana. “If they want more stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy, more free stuff. But don’t forget, nothing is really free.”
Obama portrays his law as a matter of fairness.
“As Americans, we don’t expect handouts,” Obama said last week in Jacksonville, Fla. “But we expect hard work to pay off.”
In March, the administration invited the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents the black press, to separate White House briefings.
Surgeon General Regina Benjamin spoke and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took questions from the black journalists group, which was in Washington for its annual conference to address inequities in the U.S. health care system.
“They knew that we were addressing specifics in our conference of inequity, so they tailored their speeches to why African Americans stood to benefit more disproportionately or more profoundly than the general population,” said Cindy George, a Houston Chronicle reporter who chaired the NABJ’s D.C. health conference.
Tailoring a message to a particular audience is hardly unusual. And the administration is fine-tuning its health care message for other groups as well: Obama told a crowd of senior citizens in West Palm Beach, Fla., last week that his law would allow people who “had been unlucky and ended up getting laid off at the age of 55 or 57” to stay covered.
To reach Hispanic audiences, the White House in 2011 held “White House Hispanic Community Action Summits” in 21 cities. Officials discussed several initiatives, including how people newly eligible for health insurance can get it now and once more benefits become available in 2014. The campaign also has produced Spanish-language ads about the law.
A White House spokesman said the outreach to Hispanic constituents is more granular, targeting audiences that can benefit from the changes.
“We go through, here are the benefits, here’s how it works, here’s how you can get more information,” said Luis Miranda, the White House director of Hispanic media. “It’s about public health, we’re trying to inform people. We’re trying to do what good government does, which is to be accessible and responsive to constituents.”
Part of the motivation for the White House to be so explicit in its health care message to African Americans and Hispanics is that other efforts to relay the specific benefits of the law to a broader audience have failed, said Gordon Whitman, the policy director at the Pico National Network, an alliance of faith-based organizations.
Whitman said mainstream press coverage has emphasized the political battle more than what’s actually in the law, forcing the administration to offer more detail to groups that officials think will be receptive to its benefits.
“This is an area where it’s not what’s said, but what’s heard,” Whitman said. “I think the president and the White House have talked pretty consistently about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act and what it means for people and probably more so since the Supreme Court decision. … But there have been a lot of filters that have made it difficult for people to hear it.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson, who in June hosted one of four White House African American policy forums in his Mississippi district, said Obama hasn’t done enough to explain his health care reforms.
But he counseled the president to avoid delving into the Affordable Care Act’s details with audiences that aren’t pre-sold on the changes. Crowds that oppose the health care reform, Thompson said, will only be more turned off to Obama by hearing more about it.
“If the president decides to use it in those venues where he feels it’s advantageous, he’ll use it,” Thompson said. “But I wouldn’t seek reelection in an area that was against it. I would talk about whatever interest that that area had that we agreed to.”