Rev. William Barber: Obamacare repeal would be the greatest moral failing since slavery

Rev. William Barber has to stretch deep into the history books to find a historical analogue for the damage Senate Republicans’ health care bill would do to the poor.

“You’ve not seen this kind of attack on poor people and poor bodies since the days black people were used to make free money as slaves,” Barber told Vox Thursday night. “That’s the way we need to start talking about this.”

Barber isn’t some hysterical lefty nobody: he’s the chair of the NAACP’s Legislative Political Action Committee. Last summer, he was a prominently featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention. The reverend has been termed “the closest person we have to a Martin Luther King Jr.,” in part due to his leadership of North Carolina’s NAACP chapter, which has led Moral Monday protests in the state.

On Thursday night, Barber joined a protest at the offices of Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) in Philadelphia over the health bill. It was one of more than a dozen demonstrations this week alone against Republicans’ Better Care Reconciliation Act, which would dramatically reduce subsidies for lower-income Americans while cutting Medicaid and rolling back its expansion under Obamacare. McConnell is trying to pass the bill before the Senate’s July 4 recess, even though the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the House version of the bill would lead to 23 million fewer people having health insurance while slashing taxes on the rich.

“We’re really talking about, in a sense, political murder. I know that’s a strong term, but it comes out of the bible,” Barber said. “The bible talks about in Ezekiel 22, when politicians become like wolves devouring the people and do not care for the needy.”

A transcript of our conversation follows.

There’s a temptation to see this story in terms of numbers and budgets and politics, and I’m hoping you could articulate the ways in which an abstracted conversation about politics is incommensurate with its impact on people’s lives.

First of all, this whole conversation is morally corrupt. It’s exposing the deep immorality we have in this country right now where we’re talking about repealing the Affordable Care Act, when we should be thinking about how to go from the Affordable Care Act to universal health care.

We’re the only nation in the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] that doesn’t offer universal health care. And the last time I can remember in history we talked about taking health care away like this was when in the 1800s there was a rollback of the Freedmen Bureau Hospitals [ending funding for a program passed by Abraham Lincoln to help the slaves freed in the Civil War], and there was this real, extreme, regressive group of people who wanted to go back to the days of slavery, or as close as possible, and they took away the federal funding from the Freedman’s Bureau Hospital.

Folks say “23 million” [people will lose insurance], but we should really be talking about how this is death and life. We know if you deny 500,000 people Medicaid expansion upward, there’s a Harvard study that says upward of 2,800 people will die. We know that when we’re talking about Medicaid, we’re talking about children and the deaf and the blind. We literally need to put a face on these numbers and not just talk about “23 million people.”

We’re really talking about, in a sense, political murder. I know that’s a strong term, but it comes out of the bible. The bible talks about in Ezekiel 22, when politicians become like wolves devouring the people and do not care for the needy.

The reality is around two weeks ago we saw a congressman shot, and the whole news cycle stopped. And it should have: a congressman was shot; four other people were shot; three or four people were killed in San Francisco. That’s serious business.

But what is so hypocritical about that is for Ryan and other members of Congress to say, “When you attack one, you attack all.” They are concerned about a representative, and rightfully so, for being wounded and say that we should pray. But you also mean you’re going to p-r-e-y on the most vulnerable. And you don’t have the same ethics for your fellow citizens who will literally lose their health care.

When you think about $600 billion — probably in the range of $1 trillion when they get finished — in tax cuts, you’ve not seen this kind of attack on poor people and poor bodies since the days black people were used to make free money as slaves. That’s the way we need to start talking about this.

I wanted to go back where you mentioned senators need to put a face to this. What do you think is the appropriate response from Senate Democrats?

I met with a luncheon of US Democratic senators, and I’ve said it to people in different speeches and open letters, rather than just being there they ought to be inviting constituents from their states who would be affected. They need to invite them into the gallery, to have them into the meeting rooms, to have press conferences with them.

Every time they’re up there, they need to put people who will die of cancer in front of the camera — people who did die from the lack of health care, or people with preexisting conditions. We need to change this from a conversation about tax cuts, to one about life versus death.

Are people in DC, even those who oppose the bill, feeling the implications of this in the marrow of their bones the way you think they should be?

Today you saw people in wheelchairs [staging a die-in at Mitch McConnell’s office]. And next year we’re planning a poor people’s campaign in 25 states and the district of Columbia. Because this is not going to go away. These people are committed to their oligarchs. To their money. To their power.

Anytime you can write laws that your own grandchildren will be negatively affected by, they’re operating from a different politics than the politics which is in our deepest moral and religious values.

Do you remember when Lyndon Johnson told Dr. King he couldn’t do the Voting Rights Act but that Dr. King would have to make [Johnson] do it himself? I was with clergy today in Philadelphia who were having a rally in front of Toomey’s office, and people are going to stay there all night. And I said to them: “In the days to come, you need to come back here. And if you can’t get in the federal building, get in front of the street, lay down, and force them to arrest you. Bring people with wheelchairs.” We’re going to have to create that kind of creative, non-violent tension to put a fire in the belly.

I think sometimes, some people still think we’re working with people who you can negotiate with. And what was proven under President Obama’s time is that he gave them a lot of concessions to get the Affordable Care Act passed, and they still voted against it. And a lot of the concessions were things that helped create the problems we have now.

I want to go back to something you said on race. There’s a way in which the literal text of the legislation and the public statements of Republican senators are such that there is nothing explicitly connected to the race question. But to what extent do you believe these problems are connected in more invisible ways than is normally recognized?

Some progressives sometimes want to deal with numbers; they don’t want to deal with race, either, unless it’s David Duke or the “n-word.” And that’s not systemic racism. Systemic racism is when you can show the numbers — a larger percentage of black people within the black race that are being hurt by the denial of health care, but in raw numbers you have more white people being hurt.

We need to unpack that. You hear “23 million people” — that’s about 3 million black people, which means its 20 million white people. We have had a conversation with the numbers have been disaggregated.

Do you think that progressive leaders will recognize that the form of violence you’re talking about Republicans wanting to enact through taking health care away from 30 million people is in some ways equivalent to not advocating for expanding health care to the 30 million who still didn’t have it under ACA?

We should have always talked about affordable health care as a step toward universal health care and push for that. Some people say, “You can’t do that.” But the problem is we get so scared of the polls that we don’t change the polls because we don’t want to do the hard work.

We try to argue defensively rather than offensively too often. People say, “There are a lot of problems with Medicaid,” and we have to say, “No, there were a lot more problems before Medicaid, and the whole system is flawed.”

We’re so ready to move into compromise [mode] before we allow the people understand the real moral and political issue is. Which should be: Health care is a human right. Period.

All these folks who claim to be Christian, we should be challenge this. We should never allow Paul Ryan’s agenda to say more to say about poverty [than progressives’]. If you think about progressives, and I love them, but many of them don’t even use the word “poverty.”

We have to understand that you cannot keep lowering your language and operating on the defense if you’re ultimately going to defeat this extreme narrative that is fundamentally contrary to the deepest principles of our democracy.