It’s a mantra among the lefty wonks who love Obamacare: “Obamacare is unpopular even though most of its major provisions are highly popular.”
The underlying conceit when this is rolled out is generally that the average voter has an inchoate dislike for the law but applauds what the law does. A new poll upends that bit of dogma.
The idea behind this new survey conducted by YouGov and commissioned by the Cato Institute is that it is very easy for people to appreciate a benefit if they are never presented with the cost. Most poll questions on policy, however, present only one policy at a time. Present the trade-off to Americans this poll found, and Obamacare’s provisions tank in popularity.
For instance, consider the Obamacare policy called “community rating,” which, in effect, limits how much insurers can price a patient’s risk into his premium. All else being equal, people like that:
Do you favor or oppose a provision in the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, that prohibits health insurance companies from charging some customers higher premiums based on pre-existing conditions?
63% Favor
33% Oppose
But all else is not, in fact, equal. Community rating shakes up the entire profit model of insurers. It has two immediate effects. One is that some lower-risk people see their premiums go up in order to meet the higher-risk customers in the middle. So the poll asked this:
What if this meant the cost of your health insurance would go up, then would you favor or oppose prohibiting health insurance companies from charging some people higher rates based on pre-existing conditions?
31% Favor
60% Oppose
Another side effect of regulating insurer pricing is taxpayer subsidies for insurance. That, alone, drops the popularity of community rating from 63 percent down to 47 percent. (This poll surveyed about 1,150 adults and had a margin of error of under 3 percent.)
Another provision necessary for the functioning of community rating is the individual mandate, which is famously disliked.
The pollster found similarly large drop-offs when presented with the tradeoffs on the law’s requirement that insurers keep young adults on their parents’ plans until age 26.
Environmental protection laws are similarly popular until presented in terms of tradeoffs. Here are the findings of one California poll from a few years back, as summed up by the Public Policy Institute of California.
A strong majority of adults (76%) favor a state law passed in 2011 that calls for a third of California’s electricity to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. But support declines to 46 percent if meeting this goal means paying more for electricity.
Keep this dynamic in mind this spring and summer if the media echo the liberal talking point that suggesting that the people really would love Obamacare if they just knew what was in it.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s commentary editor, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
