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States Benefitting Most from Obamacare Try to Kill It

David Callahan

State attorneys general are directly elected by voters in nearly every state and if politics made sense, the 26 AGs that have filed suit against Obamacare would be booted out by voters. Why? Because these AGs represent states that stand to disproportionately benefit from the law. Meanwhile, many AGs from states that won't see big benefits -- but will foot much of the bill for the law -- are sitting on the sidelines.

The two maps below tell this story graphically. The states that will benefit the most from Obamacare, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, tend to be in the poorer parts of America -- particularly the south -- which have lots of uninsured people. Wealthier states will see far fewer benefits, but the taxpayers from these states will pay much of the tab for subsidizing the uninsured.

As I have written before, Obamacare is a redistributive program that transfers money from affluent and largely Democratic parts of America to poorer and largely Republican areas -- not that you'd know that from the politics of this issues, which have played out as if the opposite were the case. Weird, yes, but not very surprising. As I have also written here before, citizens of red states tend to be far more dependent on government than those in blue states -- and yet their elected representatives often seem determined to choke off that life support.

States that will win big under Obamacare, judging from the second map, and yet also have joined the suit against the law include: Alabama, Florida, George, Idaho, Mississippi, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Texas.

Almost none of the states that will benefit the least from Obamacare have joined the lawsuit agasint it. Those states include: Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, and Vermont.

Politics is supposed to about who gets what. That is definitely not the case in when it comes to the war against Obamacare, in which conservative politicians are actively campaigning to block redistribution of national wealth to their constituents.

Will voters remember that betrayal come November? Probably not, I'm sorry to say.

States benefitting from Obamacare