Finally, some good political news on the ACA from Kaiser:
Approval of the ACA is finally slightly more than disapproval. There have been no death panels, there have been no grandmothers left on ice floes, and for the vast majority of people, there have been very few noticeable changes besides slightly richer benefits. The scare stories aren’t coming true, and approval ratings have been slowly trending upwards since the start of actual operations in 2014. Good policy might actually turn into slowly good politics which then means the power of inertia works for the ACA.
Samuel Knight
The hardest thing to understand on the whole big push on ACA / Obamacare is the almost resolute refusal for the President or anyone else to make a big deal speech on why it is set up the way it is. And, I think you see it in the bill’s popularity – whenever there is a forced discussion of what is actually in the bill – it gets more popular. But whenever the right wing can just assert blindly that it is awful it gets less so.
Most people have no idea of how ACA was set up and how it works. It is complicated. And on something like this, the Bill Clinton wonk explanation approach works much better than the Obama “I’ve got it” approach.
That’s why the Supreme Court case is actually a dagger pointing at the GOP. A forced crisis now will start a long of indepth discussion about the law and how it works, and why. And that’s not going to reflect well on the GOP.
Mike R
Being in the Grandparent category very glad that the ice floe thing hasn’t materialized. I really don’t like cold wet places.
So given enough time Bill Kristol may be proven right about one thing, that being, if health care reform becomes popular the republican party he loves may be out of power for some time. Oh if only this would come to pass.
Elizabelle
@Samuel Knight:
@Mike R:
Agree with both of you.
And I like some good news in the morning!
Violet
Are you sure? One of my second cousin’s brother-in-law’s ex-wife’s new husband’s step-brother’s swears he saw it happen when he was working up in Alaska that one time.
catclub
I read somewhere that the largest group that opposes ACA is a group that is not actually affected by it – those over65.
Is there any breakdown of these surveys by age?
Actually, they think they are affected by it. 2010 political ads succeeded in convincing them that Medicare had been cut to pay for ACA.
WereBear
@Samuel Knight: You grab a hundred people at random, invite them to sit still for a wonky outline, and I’ll buy the ones at the end a round of drinks.
And I don’t have much money.
catclub
@catclub: Yes you can check by age!
http://kff.org/interactive/health-tracking-poll-exploring-the-publics-views-on-the-affordable-care-act-aca/
and I was right, but not by a huge margin. 18-64 has net approval of about +1% 65-over has net disapproval of 7%
The race/ethinicity screen is most illuminating. It kind of looks like the political party screen.
Xantar
@Samuel Knight:
Obama made lots of speeches about why Obamacare is set up the way it is and also press conferences highlighting all the people it helped. I personally attended a few of them. But it never got reported in the media which was more interested in talking about the one woman who lost her coverage and had her rates go up (even though it turned out that she could have found much better coverage if she had bothered to check the California exchange).
Elizabelle
@Xantar: You kind of made Samuel’s point.
I think Obama should have done a national television address, or a few of them, to people in their homes. Bush used that to sell us a war.
It’s a lost opportunity Obama did not, to sell us health and reducing the cost curve over time.
Got to get past and over the media screen.
Cermet
Facts? All you got is fucking facts?! Please; those judging are typical amerikans: facts are like farts to these people – they just stink.
Xantar
@Elizabelle:
You only get to do a national television address if the networks give you the airtime.
Splitting Image
I’m curious to know whether the upswing in support comes from people who believed the Republican lies finally being swayed by facts or from people who opposed the ACA because they thought it didn’t go far enough coming around to the idea that it is achieving more than they thought it would.
My understanding is that the liberal media spent the last six years lumping the two groups together and making it appear that the G.O.P.’s opposition to the law was more popular than it was.
I suppose that either is good, if we can’t count on the liberal media getting any better, since they both lead to overall support going up, and that looks good on the graph.
gene108
@Samuel Knight:
Most people have no idea Social Security also pays for long term disability, they just think it is for retirement.
The amount of stuff government does that most people have no idea about is pretty vast.
EDIT: Which makes demonizing the “Imperial Federal Government” easy to do.
Davis X. Machina
If Obama hadn’t sold us out on the public option, would that approval number be 80%? or 90%?
Inquiring minds want to know…
Richard Mayhew
@Davis X. Machina: at least 112%
dmsilev
@Violet: The good news is that because of global warming, soon there won’t be any ice floes on which to maroon grandma.
Citizen_X
@dmsilev: You just toss her to the polar bears treading water. They’ll be hungry!
Elizabelle
@Xantar: And hospitals and pharma are not big TV advertisers? They don’t want to see ACA fall.
Those are public airwaves.
EconWatcher
Opinion polling like this could matter to the upcoming Supreme Court ruling on ACA, specifically to Roberts, who may end up being the swing vote. With 20 million depending on the law and public opinion evenly split and moving towards support, he’d best think long and hard before throwing it all out on some frivolous semantics. The man seems to have a genuine fear of going down in history as a hack.
So we got that going for us. Which is nice.
The other secret weapon we have is Scalia. Because if Roberts is going to sink the ACA, he’s going to want to sound all sober and judicial doing it, as if the Court has been regrettably but unavoidably driven to this result by the canons of statutory construction. But you can count on Nino to blow his cover with some screeching opinion worthy of a Fox news blonde on a meth binge (I’m pretty sure that’s what happened last time).
So God bless Antonin Scalia.
samiam
A lot of the big money people see that their only fear (making less money) is not happening. If anything they are making more. That would be the insurance companies, big pharma, and hospitals. Now that they have all basically adapted their processes they probably don’t want anything to change.
Still don’t understand why there would be such opposition to affordable healthcare which everyone seems to agree is a problem.
I understand the 65+ opposition since they have nothing to gain in their eyes. Also if they are white they are probably republican so can understand that part. My guess is that a lot of the eroding opposition are people dying off…with the Republican party slowly dying along with them.
Frankensteinbeck
@Xantar:
I specifically remember when Obama gave a press conference about a military situation, and told the press corps to their face that if he’d given it about the economic situation they wouldn’t have aired it. They did not find that funny.
I also remember Obama’s deficit speech, and how almost no one even on this blog had any idea that it was 30 seconds of ‘the deficit needs to be fixed’ and the entire rest of the time was an explanation of how we should invest in infrastructure, education, and research, and pay for it by raising taxes on the rich and cutting the military budget. All the things that he was immediately trashed as what he should have said.
One of the most persistent hallmarks of the Obama administration is that he can’t get credit for anything he does.
Davis X. Machina
@EconWatcher:
When he starts routinely producing decisions that find for a worker, a union, the environment, or the public generally, against a corporation or industry group, then I’ll believe it.
Brachiator
@Samuel Knight:
I don’t think that most people care about why ACA is set up the way that it is, nor would it make much of a difference if they did know.
I think that the bottom line is that more people have been able to get health insurance, and more people have been able to get access to medical care. This fact, that the ACA getting people to health care, has even moved the GOP to backing aspects of it. Only the unrepentant conservative lunatic fringe is insisting that the entirety of Obamacare be repealed.
gene108
@samiam:
The death throes of the Republican Party are oversstated. The frat boys at OU, singing about not letting niggers in their frat are replacing those dying off.
Darren Wilson, who murdered Michael Brown, is still under 30. George Zimmerman was under 30, when he murdered Trayvon Martin.
There are plenty of young bigots out there to replenish the ranks.
Tractarian
Check out the URL – this is the 22nd post you’ve authored entitled “Good News Everybody”.
Not complaining – keep it up!
Brachiator
@catclub: Some very interesting charts. Thanks.
I was surprised to see relatively high disapproval among Independents.
The Unfavorables among the 65 and over set is sad. I wonder how they would feel if a proposal to repeal Medicare and Social Security as well as the ACA was put before them.
samiam
@gene108: I would argue that you are wrong. Plenty yes but in the overall picture just a fraction of those people identify with the Reagan era Republican party which no longer exists. Unlike all the old wrinklies who are still under a dillusion that it’s the same Republican party as it was in the 80’s.
jonas
@Brachiator:
YMMV, but I’ve found that almost all the folks I know who claim to be “independents” are just conservatives too embarrassed to call themselves Republicans in public. But they still watch Fox, listen to Rush, and generally vote the GOP line.
jonas
It may not work in every district in every state, but especially at the national level I think we can flip the “run away from Obamacare” meme that supposedly sunk Democrats in the 2014 election. Democratic candidates need to run on “my Republican opponent is dedicated to destroying the ACA. I will strengthen it”, and make sure every Republican in every race is haunted 24/7 with the spectre of all those repeal votes in the House and every comment made by every right-wing hack on Fox talking about the need to destroy people’s health insurance. Make. Them. Own. It.
Brachiator
@jonas:
This is not generally the case in California,where many Independents or “decline to state” are people who are fed up with the two main parties.
jonas
@Brachiator:
Unfortunately, those folks control one major cable news outlet outright, and are accorded an undue amount of respect by the rest of the MSM, so their opinions have a ripple effect on more low-information viewers.
Tom Q
@jonas: This has been borne out by polling in recent election cycles. Dems now have a significant lead over GOPers in party-identification, but it’s largely because of disaffected/embarrassed Pubs calling themselves independents. These self-identified independents can still, however, be depended upon to pull the GOP lever on Election Day.
This has changed how to interpret polling of independents in presidential elections. It used to be that winning a majority of indies was the end-all goal of campaigns. But in the last election, I believe Romney actually did better with the group than Obama did. The problem for him was, he was starting from a smaller base, and harvesting only the percentage of independents any GOPer will do now, given the lean of the group toward Republicans.
Put it this way: to win a national election at thids point, Republican candidates probably now need to get close to a ten-point margin among independents, to offset the Democratic base.
RaflW
The GOP was right to shit multiple bricks when ACA implementation actually happened despite their many, many attempts to derail it.
Because now it’s a program they might be able to twiddle with, but the genie ain’t going back in the bottle. I’m not sure that even a bad SCOTUS decision can really undo it.
Folks have seen that the terror of uninsurance/really bad insurance/medical bankruptcy can be tamed. The public won’t unlearn that.
Brachiator
@jonas:
Yeah, there is the continuing pernicious influence of Faux News and other Murdoch properties, but does anyone really care about the MSM anymore? I work in an office with a lot of people age 30 and below. One guy used to subscribe to the LA Times and would bring it in to work. The Sports section would be saved and the rest of the paper thrown away. Then, apart from entertainment sites, nobody much cared about the news, except for hot headlines and stuff bounced back from Twitter or Facebook. I really don’t know what feeds the new conventional wisdom. Some of it, I guess, are people actively seeking out sources and sites that conform to their biases.
And I think that in many ways so-called low-information viewers are just was well or poorly informed as anyone else. No one really has any monopoly on good information or reliable news and opinion.
jonas
@Brachiator: I agree that print media has lost a lot of its influence; I was thinking more along the lines of CNN, the Sunday morning talk shows; network evening news, etc. — which, in the interest of “balance” have to present, e.g., climate change science and climate change denialism as two equally valid viewpoints, even though one of them is fringe lunacy. It just gets a bigger megaphone because corporate sponsors, esp. big energy, would throw a fit and bail if a major network came out and just said “and then there’s James Imhofe, a complete idiot who has no idea what he’s talking about and is so deep in the pockets of greenhouse gas-spewing companies that he spends most of his day massaging their balls, so we’re not going to talk to him. Back now to an actual expert…”
Brachiator
@jonas: Haven’t CNN and the Sunday morning talk shows lost influence as well? I know they are unwilling to acknowledge it, but how many viewers have they lost over the years? A bigger megaphone doesn’t much matter if no one is listening. Yeah, these dinosaurs are resistant to change, and still have some power because this is where the powerful show up to preen for the camera. And the powerful try to make sure they get their point across. I don’t know what the answer is if people are to lazy to switch to alternatives. Maybe some of them like the message they are hearing.
And even alternative sources (NPR, for example), still follow the same models, giving “both sides” a hearing. It’s a mess.
Kelly
Thanks Richard! You are one of my top two sources of comprehensible Obamacare info.
I had a conversation recently with a couple in the mid 80’s that have been family friends since I was a child. Told them my brother, a life long construction worker in his mid 50’s was thinking he’d retire soon due to the accumulated wear and tear. Their immediate response was of course he should be able to but wouldn’t health insurance make it terribly difficult? They had no idea that Obamacare had fixed that. I’ve been retired for a while and 2010 married. My wife had been uninsurable due to pre existing conditions. They had no idea Obamacare fixed that. Getting the stories from me the boy that used to play with their children changed their view in 15 minutes. Hopefully there are enough person to person stories out there to get Obamacare the respect it deserves.
Carolinus
@Xantar:
Yeah. They’d generally only cover snippets from his ACA speeches that the Right had decided to try and build outrages around. So on the evening news you’d see a clip and then get some quote from a GOPer as to why you should consider it controversial. I do recall ABC News broadcast an ACA focused event in it’s entirety, but only when they completely controlled it. It was some sort of town hall-style event hosted by Diane Sawyer, where the audience was packed with ACA critics (lobbyists, health care company CEOs, etc). The president also did a lot of ACA focused interviews, which again only seemed to be covered nationally in soundbites the Right selected as their latest outrageous outrage.
The real issue that the ACA PR effort never managed to overcome was that there was no Leftwing counter to the advertising total domination by anti-ACA groups. They had extremely negative TV, internet banner and YouTube ads up constantly, for years.