The better the access to health care for her constituents, the poorer the odds for South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's Republican Party.
From Joan's earlier piece on South Carolina's
expanding Medicaid rolls:
Medicaid rolls in South Carolina will grow by about 162,000 people by the middle of 2015. Had the state expanded Medicaid, another 340,000 people would get coverage. As it is, at least many more children will be covered, and their parents will probably find out in the process that if their governor hadn't been such an asshole, they would have coverage, too.
Even in South Carolina, a state hostile to Obamacare expansion, hundreds of thousands of people are benefiting just from greater awareness of existing government programs for which they
do qualify. And while most of those beneficiaries are children, those children have families who would appreciate access to similar services, if only Republicans would get out of the way.
But South Carolina is solidly Red, right? Romney won the state by 11 points, right? So it doesn't matter! Except that in raw totals, Romney won by around 204,000 votes. And Republicans assume (perhaps rightly) that every Obamacare beneficiary will become much more favorable toward the government. And if you start thinking government can help you, Republicans don't stand a chance.
So for the them, it's bad enough that nearly 200,000 South Carolina residents (mostly children) will soon be part of their so-called "culture of dependency". That alone has potentially negative electoral ramifications. But had South Carolina taken federal dollars to give another 340,000 of its residents access to low-cost health services, their entire GOP's existence would be imperiled.
That's why Republicans continue to fight tooth and nail against Obamacare, from seeking its repeal to sabotaging its rollout. It's an existential crisis. The more people benefit, the harder it will be for them to argue that government is irreparably broken and must be drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub.
