Part One
VOTER SUPPRESSION FROM JIM CROW TO TODAY.
We speak with Sam Levine, voting rights reporter for The Guardian. His article describes how a black woman faces prison time (!) because she voted in a primary election after she was released from jail. Lanisha Bratcher was found to have violated a Jim-Crow era statute that North Carolina had enacted with the intent of disenfranchising African-Americans. In 1898, because former slaves had been voting in larger numbers (and were even getting elected), NC passed a law in order to “rescue white people from the curse of negro domination.”
The law has been tweaked in the decades since its enactment, but it still has the intended effect of intimidating African-Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote. Not only does this news chill other black voters, it even scares Ms. Bratcher who is not sure if she’ll ever vote again. Why take the risk, she reasons, of getting thrown back into the criminal system after she’s worked so hard to put her life back together, get a job, train for a promotion, build a loving family, etc.
She clearly had no criminal intent. She was never even told that she was not permitted to vote. So when she was urged by her church and her community to go to the polls, she thought it was her civic duty, not a crime.
This is just one story of voter suppression still ongoing in 21st-century America. Many states, North and South, still use a plethora of techniques to prevent African-Americans from voting. Those states offer pretextual reasons for their actions. They aren’t as open as the Governor of NC was in 1903, when he honestly spoke about how disenfranchisement was part of solving “the negro problem.”
Part Two
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THE HEALTH CARE CRISIS IS EVEN WORSE IN RURAL AREAS
We talk to Simon Haeder, professor at Penn State Univ., about how rural Americans are struggling to obtain (or to keep) access to adequate health care. Hospitals are closing in rural areas, and the supply of physicians is growing smaller.
Likewise some rural hospitals have stopped providing certain health care or particular procedures. Often, ob/gyn services are no longer provided at rural hospitals. So if a woman goes to her local hospital ready to give birth, she may be told to travel a long way to get to a hospital that will provide her the services she needs. This can be life-threatening. True, every hospital in America cannot be expected to have the specialized resources necessary to provide every conceivable procedure that might ever be needed (e.g., advanced heart surgery and organ transplants). But maternity services should be available to people all across America.
Our guest also explains how private health insurers may be making the problem even worse. If your doctor is not a member of your insurance company’s “network,” then you’ll have to pay for health care out of pocket. (Or you can drive a long way and find a doctor who happens to be part of the insurance company’s network.)
In short, rural areas offer yet another perspective on the very real problem that the American health care system is not working in the way that it should. Even Boris Johnson — the conservative British prime minister — campaigned on promises to make Britain’s national health service work better. Instead of criticizing the system as “socialized medicine,” he proposed *improvements* to how the system serves rural areas, as well as other improvements.
