According to a new Gallup poll Americans are pretty much split evenly on whether or not we should repeal the new healthcare law. But as with any other government program, Americans are only against it in the abstract. Americans hate the mandate, largely because it’s called a mandate, but love parts of the bill that end pre-existing condition clauses. Of course, you can’t really have a system of private insurance that allows anybody to get a plan at any time without a mandate, so we’re stuck with the good and the bad.
The healthcare law is a mixed bag. It doesn’t go as far as many wanted it to go – something like single payer, preferably. It changes rather than expands the role of government in providing access to healthcare. It’s inefficient in some ways; in other ways it improves upon the status quo. One thing that sort of irks me about it is how politics forces us to make do with something as ad hoc as all of this. We have Medicaid – administered by the states – and Medicare – administered by the federal government – and now the ACA – administered by the states – and rather than just save tons of money and increase efficiencies enormously by combining all these programs into one federal healthcare program, we have to leave this expensive patchwork in place and then just build upon it (and the patchwork is much worse once you think about how the private insurance system is designed, and the entrenched inefficiencies baked into healthcare writ large including hideously opaque prices…)
In any case, take away the parts that people dislike about the bill and of course people suddenly love it. Talk about it being struck down, and most Americans still imagine that their favorite parts will remain.
If you took away all the fearmongering surrounding the bill, they’d probably be fine with it also. But a steady diet of death panels and threats about tax-hikes has everyone much more frightened than they would otherwise be about a bill that basically just opens up non-employer-based insurance exchanges so that people have just a tiny bit more access to reliable healthcare than they did before. It’s neither a panacea or a government take over. It’s just sort of a step in the right direction and a step in the wrong direction all at the same time, and better – certainly – than doing nothing.
The ACA hurts Obama in swing states, even if people like the bill in pieces; but as James Joyner notes, if Romney gets the GOP nod it may be a moot point anyways.
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While I’m not in favor of the law, the constitutional issue of the mandate strikes me as implying way more than most people who embrace it think it does.
The opposition is, in principle, to government forcing you to buy something you may not want. There’s a word for that: taxation. Much as I wish there were an influx of principled skepticism of the state at work here, I doubt the question is going that far for most.
I have higher hopes for ACA actually accomplishing something about medical costs than most people: it will depend significantly upon executive implementation.
Here’s my favorite factoid relating to medical care in the US: the US already spends more per capita on health care than England or Canada, both of which provide universal coverage. When the bill was still in Congress, I spoke to people about it a lot. Interestingly, almost all of the conservatives that I talked to would have had less of a problem with tax-funded single-payor system than they did with the idea of a mandate. We Americans just don’t like being told what to do.
I think one of the sad results of Democratic political timidity is that they never even tried to make the case for single payor. If they had, I think that was a political conversation they could have won.
Americans hate the mandate, largely because it’s called a mandate, but love parts of the bill that end pre-existing condition clauses.
So…basically voters like getting stuff for free.
This is not news.
Truth.
Lol, basically this article says… “American’s like mustard-cookies… If you don’t dip it in mustard…” … Sorry to tell people this but the bill is Unconstitutional and it is probabbly going to get repealed. I know some people have their fingers crossed that parts of it will stand when the supreme court burns it to the ground… but I don’t think it is the supreme courts job to go through 1,600 something pages and pick and choice which ones are actually constitutional.
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