Obamacare Does Work, If You Will Let It

We are seeing a trend of red states expanding Medicaid via the Affordable Care Act. Missouri was the latest, joining Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma and Nebraska.  All of these crimson-red states have expanded Medicaid through ballot initiatives.  In other words, bypass Republican politicians, and it turns out people like the idea of a national health care option.

There are a handful of states who have still not agreed to expand Medicaid, including the very large states of Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. When you look at the map of states that haven't expanded, you see a pretty strong overlap with the Confederacy. Only Wisconsin, South Dakota, Wyoming and Kansas have failed to both expand Medicaid and secede in 1860-1. (If Wisconsin wasn't so ridiculously gerrymandered, it would have expanded it by now.)

There is a strong historical correlation between the Confederacy and opposing social welfare programs of any kind. Some of that is cultural suspicion of outsiders, but a lot of it is that white Southerners just don't want "those people" to get things "they don't deserve."

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux points out that the electoral coalition to pass the expansion included the suburbs.  Hard core Rose Twitter has decried the Democratic inroads into the suburbs as potentially weakening efforts to expand wealth redistribution by including reasonably well-off suburbanites rather than mythical working class rural voters who - in their eyes - are ripe for a socialist agenda.  Along with so much else of their estimation of how American politics works, this is bullshit.