What Voters Hate about Obamacare: Public Polling and the Affordable Care Act’s Impact on Healthcare Quality

Capitol Hill Briefing

March 23, 2017 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT

2045 Rayburn House Office Building

Featuring Emily Ekins, Research Fellow, Director of Polling, Cato Institute; and Michael F. Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies, Cato Institute; moderated by Peter Russo, Director of Congressional Affairs, Cato Institute.

Since 1994 public polling has looked at the popularity of many of the existing goals and provisions of Obamacare (like universal coverage and community rating) and has found that these provisions, when decoupled from costs, enjoy majority support among Americans. Yet again, today in 2017, our pollsters have replicated the same pattern but with a twist: what happens if the other side of the equation, the cost, is factored into the question? What happens to public support for the most popular provisions of Obamacare and further, how did this massive transformation of the health insurance markets affect the quality of healthcare people thought they were going to get as a result?

Join us as we dig into this new research and take the true measure of public attitudes toward the full implications of this legislation. Furthermore, we’ll examine how mandatory insurance irreparably undermines the very goal of insurance by destroying what Americans want more than anything from health insurance reform: quality healthcare.