Thursday, July 5, 2012

People Like Affordable Care Act Once They Know What's In It - Joshua Holland

There are two Affordable Care Acts. There's the legislation passed by Congress in 2009, and then there's the mythical Obamacare – the perfidious “government takeover” decried and demagogued by so many conservatives.

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation asked about 12 specific provisions in the legislation, and found that, on average, 63 percent of respondents approved of the nuts and bolts of the Affordable Care Acts.  The poll found that the most popular parts of the law were also the ones most Americans weren't aware of, and vice-versa.  Fewer than half of those polled knew about the law's tax credits for small businesses that offer their employees coverage, a provision that eight out of 10 people liked when they heard about it.

None of this should come as a surprise, given the level of mendacity of the law's opponents. If the Affordable Care Act did in fact feature “death panels,” resulted in deep cuts to Medicare, represented a "massive” tax increase and “Sovietized” our healthcare system, nobody would support it. Fortunately, none of that bears any resemblance to reality.

Like the idea of government itself, people are suspicious of the Affordable Care Act as an abstraction, but when it gets to the specifics they tend to like it a lot better.

The full article is available here