[danaris]

You're right about the first part, but I'm not confused about anything.

There are genuinely many people who wholeheartedly believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and that helping them is bad. Some of them aren't even that well off themselves, but have bought into an ideology that's detrimental to them.

If you haven't encountered these people, then count yourself lucky, but don't try to deny their existence or assume your own experiences are universal.

[EgregiousCube]

Clearly people of every ilk exist, but my claim is that people like this are irrelevant to the debate around socialized healthcare. Show me an American politician who's run on the platform of openly wanting to hurt the poor because they deserve to be hurt, their electoral victory, and that person's vote against a socialized healthcare initiative. It's not a thing.

[sangnoir]

Regan's "welfare queen" comes to mind. More recent examples were those against stimulus checks (but very much for PPP "loans"). Any politician who believes in means-testing, when the bureaucracy adds an overhead greater than the amount saved is arguably out to hurt the undeserving.

You can't deny the politics of retribution exists, because politicians only give oblique references to it; voters certainly believe it, hence one voter who complained about Covid shutdowns thusly: "He's not hurting the people he needs to be"