Culture, class, and service delivery: The politics of welfare reform and an urban bioethics Agenda

Culture and class remain contested terrains in policy narratives about the right of the urban poor to access health and social services delivery systems under welfare reform. An urban bioethics agenda is needed to address these dilemmas that have arisen in the context of PRWORA and had an impact on access to health and social services in the urban environment.2;18 Such efforts, however, must address the intellectual framing of the urban poor, as well as the public policies that inscribe deterministic and stereotypical ideas about the poor alongside incomplete portraits of barriers to greater social and occupational mobility. The focus of social science researchers on the delineation of behavioral characteristics among an urban “underclass” in some instances further marginalizes and stigmatizes an already isolated urban poor. Even though Wilson, the Harvard sociologist who popularized the term “underclass” in his earlier research, has now largely disowned it, tales and stories a bound in the social policy and health literature. The media also commonly underscore perceptions that establish rumor as social science and promote stereotypes that the poor are lazy and unwilling to work. Wilson, who has analyzed contextual and neighborhood factors such as the migration of jobs to the suburbs, has also declared stance that is in opposition to those, such as New York University political science professor Lawrence Mead, who embrace a “culture of poverty” thesis and have set the tone for some welfare reform initiatives by arguing that behavior, and not joblessness, is the key, “My guess,” Mead stated after welfare reform was enacted in 1996, ”is that culture came first, and drove away the economy or the good jobs, rather than the other way around,” 21(p3)These statements continue to have dramatic impacts on the stigmas attached to public programs by promoting the idea that those in spatially concentrated radical and ethnic groups in urban areas are not members of the working class. Such perceptions have also contributed to a belief that those who participate in publicly subsidized social welfare and health insurance programs do not work. Whether one accepts that the denial of health care to citizens and noncitizens in contemporary America derives in large part from the promotion of images of the poor as pathological, states have moved steadily to institute a variety of policies under welfare reform that continue to prescribe narrower eligibility criteria for access to service delivery systems. This is occurring as the US Congress hesitates to restore excluded populations, and there are reports of questionable practices targeted at those who are eligible based on current legislation. On several occasions, for example, the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Health and Human Services has made inquiries (and issued sanctions) in cases for which state and local governments have discriminated against potential Medicaid and TANF applicants by ignoring regulations that stipulate that applications be delivered to applicants on request in a timely manner.3 While it is the explicit responsibility under welfare reform of the US Congress to pass legislation restoring eligibility to excluded populations, an urban bioethics agenda framed in a historical context has much to offer prevailing policy discourses. If, as political theorist Stone notes, a policy alternative is to be judged “by the company that it keeps,” then urban bioethicists can offer human rights paradigms and additional policy alternatives based an assessments of earlier historical experiences of stigmatization that embodied similar forms of evil.23