Fortunately for Dean Angstadt, he had a friend who refused to let him take everything Fox News says about the Affordable Care Act as truth. Otherwise, this newly-insured heart patient would likely be dead.

Yesterday, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled the 57 year-old, self-employed logger who preferred to go without health insurance than sign up for ObamaCare.

I don’t read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they’re full of it,” he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up.

That refrain changed this year when a faulty aortic valve almost felled Angstadt. Suddenly, he was facing a choice: Buy a health plan, through a law he despised, that would pay the lion’s share of the cost of the life-saving surgery - or die. He chose the former.

It was Leinhauser who eventually persuaded and helped Angstadt to sign up for insurance. He found a plan for $26.11 a month and had his life-saving surgery.

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple Blog  interviewed Angstadt yesterday. And guess what? It turns out Angstadt’s animosity to the ACA can be directly traced to Fox News:

But what accounts for Angstadt’s resistance to Obamacare in the first place? He says that he “leans” Republican and essentially listened to what the GOP had to say about Obamacare, and not so much to what the Democrats had to say. As for his media diet, Anstadt says he goes online for some of his news, but when it comes to television, “Fox News, of course, and that’s basically what I watch on TV,” in addition to local news, he says. “I like some of those radicals” on Fox News, he says. “I like O’Reilly.”

Asked if Fox News had molded his view of Obamacare, Angstadt responded, “Yeah, yeah — they get people fired up. You know what, I really do have a different outlook on it. It’s really wrong that people are making it into a political thing. To me, it is a life-and-death thing.” Of Obamacare’s namesake, Angstadt says, “I didn’t care for Obama. I can’t say nothing bad about him now because it was his plan that probably saved my life.”

One of Fox’s latest excuses to point fingers at the Obama administration is over allegations of mismanagement and neglect at a Phoenix VA Medical Center. Far be it from me to dismiss anyone’s poor medical treatment, especially a veteran’s. But you can find tons of stories on FoxNews.com about the Phoenix center, I can’t find any about Dean Angstadt.

Given Fox’s stated belief in “personal responsibility” for other people, they really need to take some here.

Watch Chris Hayes discuss this story on last night’s All In below:

Photo By Alex Proimos (Flickr: The Stethoscope) CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons