Joe Biden served as vice president under Barack Obama, but he did not sound an optimistic note on Monday when talking about the country's health-care system, which was overhauled during the Obama administration.
Obamacare is considered the Obama administration's signature domestic policy achievement, and it has withstood Republicans' repeated attempts at a legislative repeal. The legislation did not deliver the results that Obama promised, however, and at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event with the National Action Network, Biden expressed concern about the ineffectiveness of the health-care system to help the working class.
"How do we fulfill the promise of working people who still go to bed like my dad used to, staring at the ceiling, thinking, 'God, if I get prostate cancer, or if my wife gets breast cancer, we lose everything'—the single biggest reason for bankruptcy," Biden said. "How can we stand by? Guaranteeing that every single American can get affordable health care and medications, because your health should not depend on the color of his skin or your zip code, but it does."
Despite Biden's comment about bankruptcy, research suggests that lack of health insurance is the cause of only a tiny fraction of bankruptcies, possibly as low as 4 percent, although Democrats have long said it is as high as 50 percent.
Biden had gotten started on the topic by discussing systematic racism, which he said white Americans must admit is occurring.
"The bottom line is we have a lot to root out, but most of all there is systematic racism that most of us whites do not like to acknowledge even exists," he said. "We do not even consciously acknowledge it, but it has been built into every aspect of our system."
Biden cited substandard schools and economic hardships for poverty rates among African Americans, using an illustration of Obama's about some black job applicants being discriminated against based on their names.
"Barack says if your name is Jamaal and your name is Jim, and you have the same qualifications and Jim gets the job," Biden said. "There is something we have to admit—not you, we. White America has to admit there is still systematic racism."