Federal aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina is already faltering on two crucial fronts: health care and housing. Incompetence is part of the problem, but deeper political issues also play a crucial role. [...]So how does Bush help these people without creating more demand for expanded government programs?
The crucial point is that President Bush has been forced by events into short-term actions that conflict with his long-term goals. His mission in office is to dismantle or at least shrink the federal social safety net, yet he must, as a matter of political necessity, provide aid to Katrina's victims. His problem is how to do that without legitimizing the very role of government he opposes.
This dilemma explains the administration's opposition to Medicaid coverage for all Katrina refugees. How can it provide that coverage without undermining its ongoing efforts to reduce the Medicaid rolls? More broadly, if it accepts the principle that all hurricane victims are entitled to medical care, people might start asking why the same isn't true of all citizens -- a line of thought that points toward a system of universal health insurance, which is anathema to conservatives.
As for the administration's odd insistence on providing public housing instead of relying on the market, the Los Angeles Times reports that Department of Housing and Urban Development officials initially announced plans to issue rent vouchers and then backed off after meeting with White House aides. As the article notes, the administration has "repeatedly sought to cut or limit" the existing housing voucher program.
This suggests that what administration officials fear isn't that housing vouchers would fail but that they would succeed -- and that this would undermine the administration's ongoing efforts to cut back housing aid.
So here's the key to understanding post-Katrina policy: Bush can't avoid helping Katrina's victims, but he doesn't want to legitimize institutions that help the needy, like the housing voucher program.
As a result, his administration refuses to use those institutions, even when they are the best way to provide victims with aid. More generally, the administration is trying to treat Katrina's victims as harshly as the political realities allow, so as not to create a precedent for other aid efforts.
He screws up the help as much as possible, making it difficult and embarrasing to receive and use, while leaving out as many people as possible. People are dying because they cannot get medications for existing chronic conditions.
This is the conservative ideology at work. Don't ever use government, even when that is the best and cheapest way to provide needed services, and when forced to use government because nothing else is possible, don't ever use effective and efficient methods. Ideology is more important to the conservatives than the lives of Americans. Especially if those Americans are Black.
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