{"id":12194,"date":"2011-01-26T20:51:22","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T03:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12194"},"modified":"2011-01-26T20:51:22","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T03:51:22","slug":"more-americans-are-for-expanding-than-repealing-health-care-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12194","title":{"rendered":"More Americans Are For Expanding Than Repealing Health Care Reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Click<\/a><\/p>\n

A new poll by Kaiser and Harvard shows the problem the Republicans have: the only thing as unpopular as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 28% of Americans want to expand the ACA; 19% want to keep the ACA as-is; 23% want to repeal it and replace it with a Republican-sponsored alternative; and 20% want to repeal it.<\/p>\n

Put another way, 47% of Americans want to keep or expand the ACA, and 43% want it either repealed or replaced.<\/p>\n

Republican’s plan B — sabotaging the law by defunding it — is even less popular:<\/p>\n

Most Americans\u201462 percent\u2014disapprove of the idea of lawmakers using the appropriations process to slow down implementation of the law. The majority view switches here because, although most Republicans (57 percent) are in favor of the idea of defunding the bill, most independents are opposed (62 percent) along with the large majority of Democrats (84 percent). Even among those with an unfavorable view of the law and those who want to see it repealed, substantial shares of about four in ten say they disapprove of cutting off funding as a way to stop some or all of health reform from being put into place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I note that when the Democrats were favoring a policy that considerably less than 62% of Americans opposed, Republicans and conservatives found that quite immoral; “how dare the Democrats shove this down our throats!,” they cried! I’m certain that their passionate belief that Congress shouldn’t oppose the will of the people won’t suddenly evaporate now that public opinion is less aligned with their policy preference.<\/p>\n

The rest of the poll (pdf link<\/a>) has the results you’d expect; majorities of Americans favor nearly all the provisions of the ACA when asked about them one by one; everyone wants to do something about the deficit but there aren’t majorities in favor of cutting any specific programs (other than foreign aid, which we spend practically nothing on anyway).<\/p>\n

There was a pretty interesting result on the individual mandate:<\/p>\n

The individual mandate remains unpopular; 76 percent have an unfavorable view of this provision. However, some malleability in opinion exists. When those who initially oppose the mandate are read the argument that \u201cwithout such a requirement, insurance companies would still be allowed to deny coverage to people who are sick,\u201d opinion on the mandate becomes more split (46 percent favorable, 47 percent unfavorable). And when those who initially favor the mandate are told that such a mandate \u201ccould mean that some people would be required to buy health insurance that they find too expensive or did not want,\u201d opposition rises to 85 percent. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s one thing about the design of the poll that bothers me; although respondents were asked if they’d rather address the deficit by cutting programs or raising taxes, they weren’t offered the option of saying “both.” Despite that, 5% of those polled volunteered that they’d prefer a combination of program cuts and increased taxes. How much higher would that 5% have been had the poll offered “both” as an option?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new poll by Kaiser and Harvard shows the problem the Republicans have: the only thing as unpopular as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 28% of Americans want to expand the ACA; … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-health-care-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}