Dreamfire:
Check out the previous page of this thread - same thing was questioned there.
Toganet almost phrased it exactly like I did. I didn't like the answers though. Not saying they aren't right. I just don't understand them. Today's Republicans are not like Nixon, Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt or even McCain. I can't figure those guys out. They are there as public servants, but seem to only serve "their" public.
There is truly a faction of the conservatives and libertarians (e.g., much of my father's family and my father) were/are in this group, that come from some privilege (if not actual wealth, very comfortable money with a large financial safety net) that truly are repulsed by poor people b/c they think they are morally inferior and completely responsible for every bad thing that happens to them. This includes the fact that they cannot afford insurance under the pre ACA system. It's their own fault and a sign that they are inferior. If they were 'worthy', they would be working at jobs that offered insurance, or would sacrifice whatever it took to pay for private insurance.
They also object to the entire concept of Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid for the same reasons. People who can't pay for all those things are 'parasites on hard working people'. I've actually heard my father say this sort of thing lots of times, and he has trouble understanding how big an advantage he had coming from an upper middle class professional family that paid for his first car, paid for his college, and could bail him out financially early in his life when he nearly flunked out and also made a couple of other very dumb decisions. One of his younger sisters was born developmentally disabled AND has epilepsy, and he regards her as 'gross and lazy' even though she did work a state-subsidized job for developmentally disabled for many years. But she's overweight (which he views as a total flaw of character) and has an affect in talking etc that just repulses him.
What's interesting is my father is not a sociopath, but there is this complete barrier to feeling empathy toward anyone or anything that causes him to feel consistently negative emotions. My working theory about this is that he was conditioned to these beliefs by his father, and also that he's so afraid of poverty, obesity, failing at business (he was a very successful business owner), ill health, what have you in himself that he can't process it except by believing all those things are 99% under his own control and that b/c they haven't happened to him, it's evidence that he is 'superior' to most other people. However, he isn't a sociopath or anything. He's extremely loving and can be very generous toward people that he deems 'worthy'. But he just has very narrow categories of what kind of person is 'worthy'.
Interestingly, he himself was without insurance (through laziness/lack of attention) when I was born under emergency circumstances that resulted in a week of intensive care afterward for me and surgery for my mom. This event would have destroyed his financial life had his own father (who has the same world view but who handily owned an insurance company) not stepped in and rescued him by retroactively providing him with insurance.
I've seen similar reasoning in a lot of the conservatives on that side of the family.
Interestingly, my father's opinion about the evils of SS and Medicare changed a lot when his super healthy, youthful, super fit second wife got cancer at a time in the 1990s when they had to self insure b/c of early retirement. They had money, but it was a huge drain on their finances to self insure then and afterward with cancer as a preexisting condition. All of a sudden, he began to not be so conservative about health care issues. And now that he's relying heavily on SS and Medicare and definitely needs it (not being nearly as financially well off as he always assumed he would be), he supports keeping those policies. But again, he views himself as a good person who paid into those and is worthy of using of them, unlike all those he deems as freeloaders.
As hard as it is to grasp, I really think there's a subset of people that have this weirdly warped world view. They think of themselves as good, moral, and compassionate. Some of them post on this board. Paul Ryan would be a great example of this, as well. I really think that this subgroup would be pretty much fine with poor people dying of curable illnesses if they couldn't afford care.