Twelve former Confederate states refused Medicaid expansion under the ACA.

Evidence

Twelve states (most of them in the former Confederacy) refused to participate in the ACA’s central provision: an expansion of Medicaid, the federal program that provides health coverage to low-income Americans. And in at least twelve other states, Republican lawmakers have tried to restrict access to that program through cumbersome work requirements. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1160

Categorization

• XREF: The Confederacy/Medicaid pattern is a concrete instance of the book’s foundational-vs-peripheral thesis: the regional line of the slaveholding past maps onto present withholding of welfare from the poor.