You Can’t Make a Silk Purse out of ObamaCare’s Poll Numbers

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s November 2011 poll results on ObamaCare (“the ACA”) are now available. The gist:

After taking a negative turn in October, the public’s overall views on the ACA returned to a more mixed status this month. Still, Americans remain somewhat more likely to have an unfavorable view of the law (44%) than a favorable one (37%).


The survey also finds that individual elements of the law are viewed favorably by a majority of the public. The law’s most popular element, viewed favorably by more than eight in ten (84%) and “very” favorably by six in ten, is the requirement that health plans provide easy‐​to‐​understand benefit summaries. Also extremely popular are provisions that would award tax credits for small businesses (80% favorable, including 45% very favorable) and provide subsidies to help some individuals buy coverage (75% favorable, including 44% very favorable), as well as the provision that would gradually close the Medicare doughnut hole (74% favorable, including 46% very favorable) and the “guaranteed issue” requirement that prohibits health plans from denying coverage based on pre‐​existing conditions (67% favorable, including 47% “very” favorable)…


Far and away the least popular element of the health reform law is the individual mandate, the requirement that individuals obtain health insurance or pay a fine. More than six in ten (63%) Americans view this provision unfavorably, including more than four in ten (43%) who have a “very” unfavorable view.

I’ve written about such spin‐​heavy polls before, including here:

Rather than confront their own errors of judgment, [ObamaCare supporters] self‐​soothe: The public just doesn’t understand the law. The more they learn about it, the more they’ll like it…


This denial takes its most sophisticated form in the periodic surveys that purport to show how those silly voters still don’t understand the law. (In the mind of the ObamaCare zombie, no one really understands the law until they support it.) A prominent health care journalist had just filed her umpteenth story on such surveys when I asked her, “At what point do you start to question whether ObamaCare supporters are just kidding themselves?”


Her response? “Soon…”

And here:

Asking people whether they support the law’s pre‐​existing conditions provisions is like asking whether they want sick people to pay less for medical care. Of course they will say yes. If anything, it’s amazing that as many as 36 percent of the public are so economically literate as to know that these government price controls will actually harm people with pre‐​existing conditions. Also amazing is that among people with pre‐​existing conditions, equal numbers believe these provisions will be useless or harmful as think they will help…


[T]he pre‐​existing conditions provisions cannot exist without the wildly unpopular individual mandate because on their own, the pre‐​existing conditions provisions would cause the entire health insurance market to implode.


If the pre‐​existing conditions provisions are a (supposed) benefit of the law, then the individual mandate is the cost of those provisions. If voters don’t like the individual mandate–if they aren’t willing to pay the cost of the law’s purported benefits–then the “popular” provisions aren’t popular, either.


Or, as Firedoglake’s Jon Walker puts it, ObamaCare is about as popular as pepperoni and broken glass pizza.

See you again next month.