If you look at a year-long graph of public attitudes toward the national health care law, you’ll see that the last time a majority of Americans supported the Democratic plan was July 2009 — before there actually was a Democratic plan. Once voters found out what was in Obamacare, they opposed it. Opposition peaked in December 2009, when Democrats used their filibuster-proof majority to push the bill through the Senate on a straight party-line vote. Opposition remained high through March 2010, when House and Senate Democrats pulled out all the procedural stops to pass the final parts of the bill. After that, public opinion has remained remarkably steady: by a margin of 10 to 15 percentage points, Americans don’t approve of Obamacare.
Why? One obvious answer is that it’s a bad law. But that, of course, is unacceptable to Democrats who staked their careers on it. So they’ve come up with other explanations.
First they argued that voters disliked the law because they were unfamiliar with it — see Nancy Pelosi’s famous “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” remark. Then they argued that the public actually likes many parts of the law and will ultimately like the whole thing. Finally, they argued that people have been misled by Republicans and the media, particularly Fox News.
Now, they’re doubling down with a new study that gives an academic sheen to their case, as well as a “fact-checking” analysis that purportedly proves GOP dishonesty.
The study, “Misinformation and the 2010 Election: A Study of the U.S. Electorate,” came out last week from a group at the University of Maryland called WorldPublicOpinion.org. The report’s authors say they found “strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the issues prominent in the election campaign.” One of those issues was health care.
The authors base their argument on an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), made during the health care debate, that said Obamacare would reduce the federal deficit, if only by a little. The researchers found that 75 percent of those surveyed don’t believe it — they think Obamacare will actually increase the deficit. How could that be?
The answer is they were allegedly misled by Fox News (where, by the way, I am a contributor). “Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that…the health care law will worsen the deficit,” the authors conclude.
But maybe something else was going on. Perhaps the voters knew the CBO based its estimate on dubious assumptions — say, the likelihood of funding Obamacare by cutting $500 billion from Medicare — forced on it by Congress. Or perhaps voters knew that the top actuary of Medicare and Medicaid disagreed with the CBO. Or perhaps the “misinformed” voters held the commonsense belief that you cannot cover 32 million previously uncovered people and save money at the same time. The bottom line is, it is entirely reasonable to believe that Obamacare, if put into effect in the real world, will increase the deficit.
The fact-checking analysis was done by an organization called PolitiFact.com. The group recently cited as “Lie of the Year” the charge that Obamacare represents “a government takeover of health care.” Writes PolitiFact: “As Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline.”
PolitiFact says the charge is false because it “conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees.” But that’s not even true in much of Europe. And imposing draconian new regulations on the health care industry, creating “exchanges” that tightly control the sale of health coverage, fining people who don’t purchase coverage, and dictating to insurance companies what they may and may not charge — if that’s not a government takeover of health care, it’s certainly in the ballpark.
And besides, if the Republican charge is a lie, then what is this: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.” That promise, now partially retracted, was made by Barack Obama in June 2009, and repeated many times.
Next year will be full of fights about health care. Democrats will cite these studies to portray opponents as liars or dupes — anything to obscure the fact that Obamacare is simply bad law.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
