Obamacare: Losing Steam?
The president’s landmark health care bill is losing
popularity among groups that were once supporting it. According to Bloomberg
BusinessWeek, overall support for the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare)
has decreased from 46% to 33% across all groups measured, based on sample data
collected from Americans over a period of about four years. Most significantly,
support from Democrats has dropped 15% in the last month down from 70% to 55%. Looking
at the data based on groups segmented by gender, age, income, and political
party, the news looks grim across the board. Almost all groups have shown
declines in levels of support for the new law. Data collected over the past
four years has shown fluctuation, but nothing as significant as the drop in
support from Democrats in the last month. Why is this?
The Affordable Health Care Act has run into some problems with the launch of the state and federal websites created to provide information and portals to sign up. It seems that the information systems were not ready to handle the amount of traffic after they were launched. This law was fighting an uphill battle with Republicans largely against it from the beginning, and the recent problems with the healthcare website made things worse. Additionally, uninsured Americans were given a short time to get signed up, which could have caused some anxiety about the new law. This is shown by the high level of interest as noted in the level of attention around the subject.
Is the Affordable
Care Act doomed to fail?
Past attempts to overhaul the American health system has had
similar turbulence in the past. The Medicare Part “D” prescription drug benefit
was in the same situation in 2004 and was similarly unpopular, but after people
got used to the idea and seniors saw some benefits, overall support went up.
Although it is difficult to compare comprehensive health care reform to this
one component of Medicare, the “bumps in the road” with Medicare showed similar
ups and downs that we are now seeing with the Affordable Care Act.
Can you believe the data?
The Kaiser Family Foundation is a great source of
information, because they develop tools that let users manipulate and segment
data based on what is important to them. This is more than just a fun thing to
do; having the ability to drill down and look at which groups you identify with
can give you better insight into how like-minded people are thinking about a
certain issue. Unlike most survey data or other sample data sets that are
shared in news story as “fact” or just including a standard margin of error,
they highlight the importance of drilling down a bit to show where there could
be vulnerabilities in the samples. “Another complicating factor in using
standard national public opinion polls to measure early ACA impact is that some
of the groups most likely to have early experiences with the law, including
those with lower incomes and those who speak a language other than English, are
populations that are often under-represented in surveys. Weighting survey data
to national demographic benchmarks helps account for this under-representation
and ensures that the overall survey results are nationally representative, but the
fact remains that this phenomenon exacerbates the issue of having too few
interviews with individuals in these groups to reliably describe their
experiences with the law.” (Kaiser,
Data Note).
References:
Original Article:
Kaiser Family Foundation: Survey Methodology
Kaiser Family Foundation: More about the data
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