How Many Trump Voters Just Voted Themselves Out of Health Care?

As noted many times before, over the years Republicans have duped countless "conservative voters" into voting against their own best interests.  The carrots, if you will, utilized by Republicans, including Donald Trump, are always the same: appeals to racial animus and/or right wing Christian religious extremism and bigotry.   2016 proved no different and voters falling for open racism, anti-immigrant bigotry and religious based animus towards other put Trump/Pence over the top in what were thought to be Democrat fire wall states.  Now, many of those voters are about to reap the whirlwind they sowed when millions of them suddenly find themselves without health care coverage. With Georgia Rep. Tom Price, an anti-Obamacare extremist, now tapped by der fuhrer Donald Trump  to head the Department of Health and Human Services, the reasonable expectation is that Obamacare will be repealed and that the GOP will have no replacement for it.  Paul Krugman looks at the number of fools who have stupidly done themselves incalculable harm.  Here are highlights:

My original update was right! . . . . . around 5 1/2 million Trump chumps. [T]he choice of Tom Price for HHS probably means the death of Obamacare. Never mind the supposed replacement; it will be a bust. So here’s the question: how many people just shot themselves in the face?

My first pass answer is, between 3.5 and 4 million. But someone who’s better at trawling through Census data can no doubt do better.

Here’s my calculation: we start with the Census-measured decline in uninsurance among non-Hispanic whites, which was 6 million between 2013 and 2015. Essentially all of those gains will be lost if Price gets his way.

How many of those white insurance-losers voted for Trump? Whites in general gave him 57 percent of their votes. Whites without a college degree — much more likely to have been uninsured pre-Obama — gave him 66 percent. Apportioning the insurance-losers using these numbers gives us 3.42 million if we use the overall vote share, or 3.96 million if we use the non-college vote share.

There are various ways this calculation could be off, in either direction. Also, maybe we should add a million Latinos who, if we believe the exit polls, also voted to lose coverage. But it’s likely to be in the ballpark. And it’s pretty awesome. 

Perhaps it is cruel on my part, but other than the children of these cretins who will suffer due to their parents and grandparents' idiocy, I have zero sympathy for these people.  Their coming harm, both medically and financially, is wholly self-inflicted.  They chose hate, bigotry and the embrace of ignorance and they deserve to pay a truly horrific price for what they have done to others and to the nation.