Where do the beneficiaries of the ACA (Obamacare) live? That’s a question Carter Price and David Evans tried to answer at The Equitable Growth Blog. Using data from the Internal Revenue Service’s Statistics of Income and information from the Kaiser Family Foundation State Health Facts they’ve come up with three maps.

The first shows which states and counties have expanded Medicaid and the number of people helped (in the blue regions) or not helped (in the brown regions).

That’s pretty stark, isn’t it? States in the political hands of Republicans (the Deep South and the Farm Belt) are the least helped by the ACA’s Medicare expansion.

The second map at the link shows which regions benefit most from the subsidies the ACA provides to citizens over the 138% poverty level but under the 400% level.

It too shows that there are more people eligible for subsidies in the states held by Republicans, mostly in the old Confederacy.

The third map shows that if the latest challenge to Obamacare to hit the Roberts Supreme Court is decided in favor of the plaintiffs, the hardest hit will be in the South and the Midwest.

As Brad DeLong says,

The only way I can find to understand the pattern of Medicaid expansion nullification is a truly extraordinary unconcern on the part of Red State politicians with their poor–whether working or non-working–and substantial insulation as a result of the rise of right-wing billionaires from financial pressures put on them by the doctors who used to be the financial fund-raising bedrock base of the Republican Party. Plus remarkable unconcern with the the health of their state-level economies.

[snip]

The lack of any sense on the part of the Red-State Republican political establishment that they are there to work for or in any sense represent the working classes of their states is astonishing.

Isn’t it? It’s as though that establishment assumes those votes are completely locked up for it thanks to gerrymandering and millionaires willing to funnel money to its candidates, and there’s no need whatsoever to help the actual people in those states. To the detriment of the poor and middle class residents of those counties and states, the establishment may be right.