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Johnathan Metzl explores it a bit in his book Dying of Whiteness[0]. Here's an example of something he described in an interview[1] about the book and his other work:

>Now I will say that some of the individual stories—I mean, one story that jumps out at me was I was doing interviews about the Affordable Care Act, and I was interviewing very, very medically ill white men who really would have benefited—this is in Tennessee, and in other places in the South where they didn’t expand the Medicaid, they didn’t create the competitive insurance marketplaces—and I said like, “Hey, you guys are dying because you don’t have healthcare. Why don’t you get down with the Affordable Care Act? What’s your reason?”

>And I would say a number of people told me things like, one man told me, “There’s no way I’m supporting a system that would benefit,” as he said, “Mexicans and welfare queens,”—like total racist stereotypes. And so, even though he would have benefited—and his guy, ultimately over the three years of interviews, he passed away because he didn’t have medical care—so he was literally willing to die rather than sign up for a program that he thought was gonna benefit immigrants.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness [1] https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/jonathan-metzl/




Is it clear that the guy really believed that Obamacare would benefit him?

It’s not him being a racist if he genuinely thought that the program would benefit immigrants and not benefit him.




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