“He’s got a lot to do with that”

From the New York Times, a textbook example of OIP Derangement Syndrome preventing someone from seeing her best interests:

The Affordable Care Act allowed Robin Evans, an eBay warehouse packer earning $9 an hour, to sign up for Medicaid this year. She is being treated for high blood pressure and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder, after years of going uninsured and rarely seeing doctors.

“I’m tickled to death with it,” Ms. Evans, 49, said of her new coverage as she walked around the Kentucky State Fair recently with her daughter, who also qualified for Medicaid under the law. “It’s helped me out a bunch.”

But Ms. Evans scowled at the mention of President Obama — “Nobody don’t care for nobody no more, and I think he’s got a lot to do with that,” she explained — and said she would vote this fall for Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, who is fond of saying the health care law should be “pulled out root and branch.”

It’s not clear what Evans meant by “Nobody don’t care for nobody no more, and I think he’s got a lot to do with that.” If she meant that there’s a lot of antagonism in the country, that’s true, but President Barack Obama isn’t a source of hostility; he’s the recipient of hostility from people like her. If Evans was saying that people don’t look after each other, then the President’s health-insurance reform tried to counteract that trend—as she has experienced.

Thanks to a Democratic governor, Kentucky is one of the states that voted against President Obama but accepted federal money to expand Medicaid to help people like Evans. It did so, however, under the name Kynect, shielding people from having to acknowledge they were benefiting from this President’s policies. As a result, the number of uninsured Americans has gone down considerably in Kentucky while it remains high in other states, like Texas.