Posted on 09/16/2013 2:00:15 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Two new detailed polls out today, from The Wall Street Journal and the Pew Center, confirm and deepen the grim state of public opinion on Obamacare. The law remains as unpopular as ever. There is a massive intensity gap between opponents of the law and supporters (41 percent of Americans strongly disapprove, against just 26 percent who strongly approve). And the main characteristic of public opinion is that people have no idea how the law works.
Lack of knowledge about the law has always been closely associated with opposition. Most of the provisions of the law, when described to people, poll well. But few people know what provisions are in the law, let alone how they fit together. And the less people know about the law, the less they like it:
But more you know about HC law, the more you like it: Know well: 42% good idea/45% bad idea. Don't know well: 17% good idea/44% bad idea — Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) September 16, 2013
And yet the picture is not quite as negative as the topline numbers indicate. The fact that confusion drives public opposition means that the intense ideological hatred for Obamacare that has come to define the Republican Party — as I argue in my story in this week’s print magazine — means that Republicans lack much support for their fanatical mission to destroy it. Only 23 percent of Americans want elected officials to make the law fail:
These are, however, the most committed Republican partisans, and the ones most likely to vote in GOP primaries, which has made Republicans in Congress heed its demands for provoking an apocalyptic confrontation.
The most important information is how little the uninsured know about the law. Seventy-six percent of people who don’t have health insurance don’t understand the law. Only half of them know that there are subsidies to offset the cost of buying insurance for people with low incomes. (For a yes/no question on which even a completely uninformed person has a 50 percent chance of guessing right, half is a really low proportion.)
The uninsured have always approached the health-care debate with a toxic mix of cynicism and lack of specific understanding. Sarah Kliff is one of the many reporters who has found this: “Change is good, and it may be a real change, but if it was doable, it would have been done by now,” Marina Sokolovsky, a 26-year-old who lacks insurance, told me when I met her late last year at a focus group on the health law. “For how complicated things are, it would be a really big shift to find something functional. I just don’t think that’s possible.”
The lack of information at the hands of the uninsured represents one of the greatest barriers to the success of the law. And that lack of information is itself a political weapon against it. Republicans have attacked funding for outreach that is needed to spread awareness of the law’s availability. Residents of states whose governors have boycotted establishing a health exchange are particularly unlikely to know that the law is available to them.
At the same time, this also highlights the politically transformative potential of Obamacare. The American health-care-policy debate has traditionally ignored the needs of uninsured Americans. Doctors and hospitals receive solicitous treatment from Washington. So do Americans who get employer-provided care. Both the industry and the ranks of the insured can identify their interests, and those interests are protected as a result. Elected officials have allowed a system to persist for decades that subjects tens of millions of Americans to intolerable risk because those Americans are outside the system. Once they are in the system, everything changes. Any future revision will have to account for them. Anybody who wants to overhaul the health-care system will not merely have to protect insurers and medical providers but Americans in health exchanges, too. It will no longer be possible for Republicans to propose repealing Obamacare and making some vague hand-waving to do something for the uninsured at some future point. Republican health-care reform will have to include everybody. All this is contingent on the law actually getting up and running.
Republicans are afraid of that transformation, and they’re right to be.
That must be it. Of course.
Any republican who votes to defund Obamacare will really be in for it once America finally understands just how great it is.
How many people know it well if even Pelosi didn’t?
It’s people chock full of Democrat talking points that are saying they know it well. Republicans don’t bother picking it apart with equal zest, as if it deserved the dignity.
I didn’t follow the end of the article. It made it sound like the uninsured would favor 0bamacare, because it finally addresses their needs. Let’s take a look at the dynamic with these “uninsured” people:
1. They are getting their hours cut, many to being able to just barely eke out an existence, because of 0bamacare;
2. Then they get whacked for the cost of insurance on the exchanges, which they cannot afford, assuming their state is even participating in an exchange;
3. Or in the alternative, they have to go out on the private market, and I’ll bet the cost there is no different;
4. Or if they don’t want insurance, they get whacked with a tax/penalty/fine/attainder/whatever the Supreme Court wants to call it;
I just don’t see how these people are going to be grateful for that kind of attention.
If Americans were just more intelligent like the President and the Democrats in Congress, they would understand that Obamacare is actually good for them. [/sarc]
Oh, brother. The propagandists are working overtime to portray this turd and solid gold.
Here my visual of how Obamacare came to be:
They set up a computer somewhere at the Capitol in a room where only democrats knew about it.
They had a sign above the computer that read, Any healthcare idea you have ever had import here
So, any democrat with a thumb drive stepped up to add their ideas.
Problem is how do you collate all that information into any sort of comprehensible order? All those anti-American, anti-free enterprise ideas designed to uproot 1/6 of our economy and also designed specifically to ingratiate itself into the delicate relationship between a person and their doctor by injecting a nosy government agent.
"When we get this all passed by Congress then we will make 'adjustments' as needed."
All of the 'adjustments' will be designed to clean up any incidental 'mistakes' that might impinge on the liberal elite.
Why is this in the news section?
Isn't there a "Humor" section here in FR?
NOBODY has any idea how the law works. Even Congress couldn't be bothered to write it or read it, never mind understand it!
Who the hell, even if educated enough, has the time to read 12,000 pages of legislation, with 20,000 pages of "clarifications" and policies?
There should be an Amendment adopted that would make any law passed by Congress null and void, if the average citizen can't understand it. Make the decision automatic if a present member of Congress (both houses, chosen at random) can't explain it in a public forum.
Any government initiative that takes more than 10 pages to explain is doomed to be a disaster.
Under Obamacare you will have to admit what kind of sex you have had and who with. Oh brother!
IRS just cannot wait to get that into the data base. It will improve both health and tax compliance (Blackmail).
If you just sit down and UNDERSTAND it, you would love it!
But in this case, it's deliberate. Lack of information on this boondoggle is essential to its use. It is to be as-you-go enforcement. Those for the liberals and feral government will get preferential treatment. Those opposed (conservatives) will get little or bad care, unless you have the money to pay the a doctor out of pocket).
This is Barky’s promised “slavery reparation”. He said the reparations would take a different form than money and items.
We are now “paying”.
When described by left-wing liars, you mean.
And the main characteristic of public opinion is that people have no idea how the law works.
NOBODY knows how the law works, including the guys who wrote it. NOBODY. So, the polling only improves when the leftist Obamakissers and Obama's special propaganda troops lie and lie and lie their heads off. But it only improves slightly, and then falls back, since the explanations are impossible to understand.
Neither did the Congresspersons who voted it into law.
In fact, they hadn't read it and didn't know what was in it.
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