The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein

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(No Transcript)
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African Americans

• The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein Charles
  Murray asserted that African Americans are
  genetically predisposed to low intelligence
• Readers believed that the authors used advanced
  statistics and methodology to prove their
  assertion

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Improvements

• Proposition 209 in California in 1997- forbade
  public universities from displaying any
  preference for persons of color in the admissions
  process
• State legislation gave 38.5 million to enrich
  the curriculum and provide special tutoring to
  African Americans, Latino, Native American, and
  Asian Americans in public secondary schools
• Goal increase the pool of eligible minority
  students

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Immigrants

• Proposition 187 in 1994- declared illegal aliens
  ineligible for medical, social, and educational
  services
• A number of legal immigrants have resided in the
  U.S. for years, paying social security, medicare,
  federal, state and local taxes

• Republicans gave states the option of
  terminating legal immigrants from Medicare and
  exempting legal immigrants who had worked for
  less than ten years from SSI and Food Stamps

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Immigrants continued.

• Banned illegal immigrants from participating in
  any state-funded programs and Medicaid, as well
  as use of public schools by their children
• Denying undocumented workers access to medical
  programs would cause an epidemic of diseases like
  AIDS also the denial of education to their
  children would force them to roam the streets and
  possibly increase gang and criminal activity

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• Elimination of entitlement status for AFDC, the
  block-granting of Food Stamps, and revision of
  Medicaid policies to end the phased inclusion if
  children over the age of 12
• - in other words
• - children over the age of 12 were not
  covered
• - threatened to cast even larger numbers of
  children into poverty
• In 1996, 21 states were under court supervision
  for failing to properly care for children in
  child protective services and in foster care
• Social workers were blamed for failing to detect
  child abuse or neglect

Children
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• The welfare reform legislation restricted
  eligibility to SSI for children with behavioral
  disorders even thought congress agreed in 1997 to
  continue Medicaid benefits to children that lost
  their SSI eligibility
• Decrease funding for meals of children in family
  day-care homes, as well as cut in reimbursements
  for summer food programs- and eliminated start-up
  and expansion funding of the School Breakfast
  Program
• Eliminated the guarantee of child care for
  welfare recipients trying to move into employment
  that existed under AFDC, leaving it to individual
  states to determine whether and for how long
  former recipients received subsidized child care

• Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities
  Act of 1996, most legislators focused NOT on the
  well-being of children but on methods of reducing
  the welfare rolls as rapidly as possible
• Income declined for the poorest 20 of
  female-headed families, this means that progress
  in reducing childhood poverty before 1995 was
  brought to a standstill- and children who
  remained poor became poorer on average
• These adverse economic consequences for poor
  children were, in turn, largely caused by sharp
  cuts in government cash and food assistance
  supports of poor families

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Women

• Continuing extraordinary gap between the
  median wages of men and women.
• Many professional women continued to encounter
  the so-called glass ceiling they were not
  promoted to higher positions even when their job
  performance was excelled
• Women with a high school education or less could
  not expect to earn substantially more than the
  minimum wage or to have strong promotion
  prospects

• Womens reproductive rights were under attack by
  conservatives in Clinton era
• Confronted with pickets at clinics or when
  forced to travel 50 miles, to find a clinic that
  would perform abortions
• The morning after pill was commonly used in
  Europe, was not widely available in the U.S.,
  partly because pharmaceutical companies feared
  boycott of their other products by abortion foes.

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Gay Men Lesbians

• Clinton had made a campaign promise to end the
  military s homophobic policies, under which
  candidates known to be gay men or lesbians were
  denied admission and military personnel who came
  out as gay or lesbian or were determined to have
  engaged in homosexual acts were dismissed
• About 14,000 people had been dismissed under
  these rules between 1983 and 1993 roughly 25
  were women
• Democratic Senator Sam Nunn advanced a DONT
  ASK AND DONT TELL approach, under which
  military leaders would be prevented from
  questioning recruits or personnel about their
  sexual orientation but could still dismiss
  personnel who identified themselves as gay or
  lesbian, engaged in homosexual acts, or sought to
  marry a person of the same gender

• Unfortunately data in 1999 suggested that the
  dont ask and dont tell had had virtually no
  effect in reducing the number of dismissal of
  gays and lesbians from the military

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Health Care reform
U.S had developed a health-care system that
revolved around employers and private insurance
companies This system often worked well for those
who were covered by it, but others lacked
coverage because they were unemployed, because
their employers chose not to offer health
insurance, or because chronic or catastrophic
conditions had exhausted their benefits About 40
million Americans lacked private health insurance
or access to Medicare and Medicaid in 1992
Moreover, those 40 million uncovered Americans-
the people most needing health reforms were not
politically organized and often did not
vote Clinton decided in 1993 to place Hillary
Clinton in charge of health-care reform with the
assistance of Ira Magaziner
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Health - care reform continued
Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner chose universal
health coverage as the central goal Health reform
might mean large costs in the short run- even as
much as 100 billion- to give uninsured Americans
coverage Clinton decided not to seek major new
taxes to fund heath care but to rely instead on
a tax hike on cigarettes, cuts in existing
programs like Medicaid and Medicare
Clintons plan would establish regional health
organizations that would provide competing plans-
including both HMOs and plans initiated by
insurance companies and providers- between which
consumers could choose
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Clinton's plans were as follows...

• Most employers would be required to fund heath
  care for their employees
• The federal government would fund the purchase of
  private health insurance policies for unemployed
  people or part-time workers
• The government would establish the basic minimum
  coverage to be included in all health policies
• Publicize competing health-insurance policies so
  that consumers could select the plan that they
  wished- and change plans when they liked another
  plan

5. Private insurance companies would not be
allowed to discontinue coverage for preexisting
conditions 6. Government would develop controls
over the prices charged by pharmaceutical
companies for existing and new drugs 7.
Government would provide every American with a
health-security card, to be used when seeking
services from health care plans 8. Medicare and
Medicaid would retained, but their enrollees
could join competing plans
Clinton insisted that the plan would cut the
deficit by 91 billion by 2000 because they
believed competition would markedly reduce costs.
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Problem
Republicans branded the Clinton proposal as
unworkable or as excessively costly The American
health care system polarizes Americans into
INSURED AMERICANS (who get their insurance
through their employers)
UNINSURED AMERICANS (who tend to be relatively
poor)
Insured people are fearful that their coverage
will suffer, or their fees will rise, if
uninsured Americans are brought into their
system The defeat of his health-care plan was a
crushing blow to Clinton
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Have a Happy Thanksgivng Break! The End