“Purposely Stripped Of Context”: When Obamacare Polls Are Accurate Without Being True
As Republicans form a circular firing squad, nervous Democrats continue to believe that this is a depressing time when the future of Obamacare is on the line.
There is some reason for worry: the Koch brothers are spending millions trying to get young people to “opt out” of seeking health insurance at the state level, which could wreck the risk pool essential for the program’s success.
But young people, who as a group support President Obama, aren’t likely to buy Koch lies. And Hollywood progressives are about to unveil a strange-bedfellows alliance with insurance companies that will spend tens of millions of dollars telling Americans the truth — that they are better off with Obamacare being fully implemented.
Meanwhile, the chances of the Affordable Care Act being defunded in Washington are between zero and none, as many Republicans are now acknowledging. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) doesn’t have the votes for his strategy of threatening a government shutdown over Obamacare, and everyone but Cruz knows it. Karl Rove wrote an impassioned plea to Republicans not to use this “ill-conceived tactic.” Some analysts believe a government shutdown, which would almost certainly be blamed on the GOP, could even give Democrats an outside shot at winning back the House in 2014.
So why the jitters on the left? At least part of the explanation lies in polls on Obamacare that have been misunderstood or stripped of context. Over and over, Americans have been told that the public doesn’t support the president’s signature achievement. This is true in only the most literal sense of the word. It turns out that the idea behind the new law — universal coverage — is backed by a strong majority.
To get a sense of how the media are misreporting the story, consider a September 15 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. As David Weigel has noted in Slate, this is one of the most reliable polls around. It found public widespread ignorance about the law, which will be implemented beginning October 1, and a high level of skepticism about Obamacare’s ability to improve people’s lives The poll reported that 30 percent of respondents thought it would have a negative impact on their families and only 12 percent were convinced it would be positive. More than half felt — accurately — that it would have no impact on their families.
But those weren’t the results that made headlines. It was the overall figure — 43 percent support Obamacare and 54 percent oppose it — that received wide coverage, just as similar poll numbers have in the past.
This is a classic example of something being accurate without being true.
As New York Times columnist Charles Blow has noted, a new CNN/ORC Poll shows that while 35 percent of the public (the conservative base) oppose Obamacare because it’s too liberal, 16 percent oppose it because it isn’t liberal enough.
In other words, 59 percent of the American public either supports Obamacare or wants it to go further.
This casts an entirely new light on the health care debate and further isolates the obstructionists. They are now exposed as radicals who believe in extortion rather than elections — a fringe group of what John McCain in another context called “wacko birds.”
More evidence to bolster that point comes from a CNBC poll that shows the public opposed to cutting off funding for Obamacare by 44 to 38 percent. If it meant a government shutdown, nearly 60 percent oppose defunding. Surely if a majority opposed the idea of Obamacare, a similar majority would oppose the funding of it.
Liberals are justifiably upset about the way public opinion has been misreported on this issue, and most of the blame rests with reporters who don’t probe the internals of polls deeply enough.
But progressives have a role to play in changing the way the polling looks.
Longtime supporters of a single-payer system (I am among them) need to stop telling pollsters that they don’t like Obamacare, even if its provisions seem inadequate to them. Otherwise they will continue to be lumped in with Tea Party types and depicted as standing against a landmark achievement that liberals have been seeking since universal coverage first appeared in Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party (Bull Moose) Platform of 1912.
By: Jonathan Alter, The National Memo, September 23, 2013
“Letting The Debt Ceiling Cave In On Seniors”: Republican Actions Could Well Spell Disaster For Them In The Mid-Term Elections
Democrats used to be able to count on the senior citizen vote. After all, it was FDR who created Social Security and Lyndon Johnson who created Medicare. But, hello, that was about 75 years ago and 50 years ago, respectively! Times do change.
As I like to scream at my Democratic friends, the post-65 generation were Ronald Reagan voters and had zip to do with FDR and LBJ.
As most now know, the only age group to support John McCain was the 65+ crowd and Romney beat Obama handily among seniors in 2012. Romney got 56 percent of the senior vote and McCain go 53 percent to Obama’s 45 percent in 2008.
The 45-64 group was very close in 2008 and Romney narrowly won it in 2012. And this was when Obama was the first Democrat since Carter in 1976 to receive more than 50 percent of the vote.
So what is my point?
Republicans have taken serious hits for their efforts to shut down the government and their possible refusal to raise the debt limit. In my blog post last week, I quoted Ronald Reagan on the debt limit. He got the message; he never drank the Kool Aid on that one.
But here is a very serious problem for the Republicans. If they really go through with their draconian plan, sure it hurts everyone, hurts the economy big time. But who does it especially freak out? You got it, senior citizens.
Why? The retired and those who live on fixed incomes and who have to draw on their retirement accounts get hammered. The last time the Republicans even threatened to hold the debt limit hostage in 2011, the stock market went down 17 percent.
Let me repeat that: After the debacle of 2008 and the economic meltdown, the stock market took a 17 percent hit for one reason and one reason only – Republicans doing what Reagan had warned against. Plus, the U.S. credit was downgraded, which was unprecedented.
Seniors can’t afford to have that happen again and they know it – their 401(k)’s can not become 201(k)’s. The crash in 2008 and the double digit hit in 2011, if repeated, will affect those who are retired and those planning on retirement, and that is about 50 percent of the voters. If Republicans lose substantial numbers of those who are over 50 years old, it won’t just impact their chances of winning the presidency, with the changing demographics of race and ethnicity, but it could well spell disaster for them in the mid-term elections as well. Republicans could lose the House and not make the gains they want in the Senate.
Republicans may think they are going strong with their base of tea party radicals bashing the Affordable Care Act, but nothing impacts voters as much as watching their monthly savings and retirement statements tank.
Seniors and upcoming retirees watch their stocks and bonds and IRAs and 401(k)’s like a hawk and if Republicans get the blame for big losses, trust me, they will feel it big time at the polls next November and for many Novembers to come.
Shutting down the government and defaulting on our obligations are not just bad policy, but they are really bad politics for the Republicans. They simply cannot afford to watch their advantage with the 50+ age group evaporate.
The real question is will the Republicans come to their senses? It is not a sure bet.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, September 23, 2013
“Principles Of Hostage Taking 101”: The Debt Ceiling Is A Hostage John Boehner Absolutely Can’t Afford To Shoot
Speaker of the House John Boehner’s never-ending quest to placate the tea party resulted in the GOP approving a bill on Friday that would fund the government through mid-December, while “defunding” Obamacare. (Never mind that, as U.S. News’ Carrie Wofford has pointed out, “defunding” Obamacare in this manner doesn’t actually work.) If, as expected, the Senate strips the defund provision and kicks the bill back to the House, Boehner will have to find yet another way of keeping his radicals at bay.
The next hostage, then, is likely the debt ceiling. Technically, the U.S. has already reached its statutory borrowing limit, but the Treasury Department has been using extraordinary measures to delay the reckoning, a tactic that will no longer work come mid-October. And already, the GOP has drawn up a wish-list of policy concessions it hopes to extract in return for raising the debt ceiling, running the gamut from changes to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and means-testing of Medicare to approval of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. If defunding Obamacare doesn’t happen now, expect that to be added to the list.
But President Obama, it seems, has learned his lesson from previous debt ceiling standoffs, and this time is refusing to play ball. He even called Boehner on Friday night to reiterate that he does not plan to negotiate over whether the U.S. government will actually pay its bills (which remember, is all raising the debt ceiling ensures).
Why is Obama right to offer the GOP nothing when it comes to raising the debt ceiling? Well, the debt ceiling is a hostage which the GOP is simply not willing to shoot. As former GOP Sen. Judd Gregg, N.H., explained in an op-ed in The Hill today:
You cannot in politics take a hostage you cannot shoot. That is what the debt ceiling is. At some point, the debt ceiling will have to be increased not because it is a good idea but because it is the only idea.
Defaulting on the nation’s obligations, which is the alternative to not increasing the debt ceiling, is not an option either substantively or politically.
A default would lead to some level of chaos in the debt markets, which would lead to a significant contraction in economic activity, which would lead to job losses, which would lead to higher spending by the federal government and lower tax revenues, which would lead to more debt.
Two years ago, when the very same debate over raising the debt ceiling was occurring, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. – who would go on to be his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012 – confirmed that taking the debt ceiling hostage is impossible. “You can’t not raise the debt ceiling. Default is the unworkable solution,” he said. He then attempted to justify the GOP’s move anyway, but the word salad that resulted shows just how untenable their plan really is.
The economic damage that would result from actually allowing the country to default on its financial obligations – be they payments to foreign debtors, Social Security recipients or government vendors – would be catastrophic, not to mention the mess that would occur in markets around the world when the absolute certainty that is U.S. payment of its debt disappears overnight. According to the Government Accountability Office, the last debt ceiling debacle, which didn’t result in a default, cost taxpayers $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2011 alone. That would seem like chump change compared to the costs of an actual default.
Now, it may be that the GOP leadership lets the tea party get its way by shutting down the government over Obamacare, rather than risking a debt default. But Republicans who remember the Clinton-era shutdowns are not ready for a sequel. So Boehner is left in the unenviable position of making his wild faction a promise on which he can’t possibly deliver. It remains to be seen how he’ll get out of it, but Obama is certainly under no obligation to help.
By: Pat Garofola, U. S. News and World Report, September 23, 2013
“Self Deluding For Fun And Profit”: Once Again, “The American People” Disagree With The Shutdown Caucus
New results from a pair of polls released today further undermine the right-wing fringe’s push to either defund Obamacare or shut down the government – and further puts the lie to the delusional notion that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and his tea party fanatic cohorts are trying to work the will of “the American people.”
First, on the specific issue of the push to defund the Affordable Care Act (the official name of the law everyone calls Obamacare), a new CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds that not only do a plurality of Americans oppose the effort to stop the law by not funding it, but that when the question of shutting down the government or causing the U.S. to default on its debt (by not raising the debt ceiling – the next pressure point the fringe wants to use to stop the law) is raised, the opposition becomes dramatically more pronounced.
According to the poll, Americans oppose defunding by 44-38 percent, but that opposition increases to 59-19 when a shutdown or default comes into the discussion. It gets worse for the defund crowd. Not only do independents oppose defunding by 44-40, but that margin balloons to 65-14 when a shutdown enters the equation. And even Republicans (who support defunding in general by 51-36) oppose the defund plan 48-36 when shutdown or default enter the mix. It will surprise no one that the only subgroup favoring defunding even if it means a shutdown is tea-party-supporting Republicans.
In case you’re late to the debate, funding to keep the government open will expire at month’s end and Congress is expected to pass a bill to keep the money flowing at least for a few months more while a longer-term spending package is worked out. Last week, the House passed a continuing resolution that denied funding for the Affordable Care Act (never mind that that won’t even stop the law) and the Senate is expected to strip the provision out and send a “clean” bill back to the House.
People like Cruz who are leading the quixotic defund-or-shutdown fight insist that the House should keep sending back variations on a defunding bill – even as the government shuts down for lack of funding – in the expectation that eventually President Obama and the Senate will throw up their hands and agree to gut Obamacare because … well, it’s not really clear why they’ll surrender, but Cruz and company are pretty sure that they will when they witness the right’s sheer force of will. (Asked about the push on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said, “Tactics and strategies ought to be based on what the real world is. We do not have the political power to do this. … So we’re not about to shut the government down over the fact that we cannot, only controlling one house of Congress, tell the president that we’re not going to fund any portion of” Obamacare.)
The tea party types have long argued that the GOP’s problem in recent years has less to do with things like demographics than with the public’s desire for a purer, harsher brand of conservatism. If only Republicans would stop compromising, the thinking goes, America would reward them with electoral success.
That belief, too, is wrong, according to the latest poll from Gallup, which asked adults whether it’s more important for political leaders to compromise, stand by their beliefs or be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. A majority of Americans (53 percent) want compromise while less than half as many (25 percent) want pols to stick to their beliefs and 20 percent want a compromise between, err, compromising and principles. To put it another way, nearly three-quarters of Americans don’t want Washingtonians to take an uncompromising position on major issues.
Senator Cruz, are you listening?
The cross-tabs are not surprising if you’ve seen polling on this topic before: Democrats and independents favor compromise over rigidity (61-20 and 55-24 respectively) while Republicans are more split, 38-36, with 25 percent wanting a middle position between compromise and standing strong – though that again means that even among Republicans 63 percent favor a position other than obstinacy.
As discussed last week, proponents of the defund scheme like to invoke “the American people” as being on their side given that polls show that Obamacare remains unpopular. But today’s polls underscore again that, at best, Cruz and company are self-deluding and at worst they’re charlatans cherry-picking data to support their narrow agendas (for fun and profit, as Brian Walsh recently argued). Americans may not like the law but they don’t want to fully roll it back and more broadly they want our leaders to work together not grandstand in the name of principal.
Again, are you listening Senator Cruz?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 23, 2013
“The GOP Mental-Health Hypocrisy”: Obstructing The Law That Does More To Advance The Cause Since ‘You-Know-Who’ Became President
So now we’re being treated to the charming spectacle of Republicans, or a few of them anyway, purporting to care about mental-health treatment in the wake of the Washington Navy Yard shooting. How touching. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they care about mental health. They’re just coming up with something to say in the wake of the tragedy that sounds to the willfully credulous like action and that won’t offend the National Rifle Association. Meanwhile, they have devastated mental-health funding since you-know-who became president. And more important than that, they voted against, and are now preparing to vote en bloc to defund or delay, the law that will do more to address mental health and give society at least a chance that future Aaron Alexises will get treatment that could prevent them going on shooting sprees since … well, pretty much since ever.
Alexis bought his weapon in Virginia, a state where anyone this side of Charles Manson can buy virtually any kind of gun he lusts after as long as he’s a resident. Current federal guidelines bar gun sales only to people who have been institutionalized or “adjudicated as a mental defective.” Neither of these narrow criteria applied in Alexis’s case. Not that it would even matter if one had, as The Atlantic noted; the Virginia Tech shooter had been so adjudicated and still was able to purchase his firepower in the commonwealth. (Alexis, being a nonresident, was blocked from purchasing an AR-15).
Alexis was fairly typical of the type of person who stands precious little chance of getting any mental-health treatment in this country. For starters, he was male, young, and black. That’s an unlucky combination of things to be in the United States for millions of people. But hitting that trifecta and being mentally ill on top of it constitutes the holding of a very unfortunate ovarian-lottery ticket. Single mothers, children, and the elderly all qualify for more forms of assistance than men do. Increasingly, there is a place where men like this wind up where they finally might get a little bit of treatment. It’s called jail. Our prisons are full of mentally ill substance abusers who committed crimes.
There are two things society can do about future Aaron Alexises. One, it can do nothing to improve mental-health approaches and let people fester, but even then it can at least take tougher steps to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Two, it can try to be a little more proactive about this whole category of illness, which affects nearly 60 million Americans (yep, one in five). On both counts, there is one party in Washington that’s eager to act, and one that is perfectly happy to let crazy people buy guns and perfectly content that we have more and more mentally ill people walking around with no treatment. Any guesses?
You may think I have phrased the above unfairly, but this is what the GOP position amounts to. On tougher background checks for the mentally ill, there were provisions in the Manchin-Toomey background-check bill, the one that nearly every Senate Republican voted against. This week New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte is talking up new legislation. You perhaps have read that “even the NRA” supports toughening mental-illness regulations. That’s nice in theory, but in fact, the Senate is not going to do anything on guns and mental illness right, and the reason it’s not going to do anything is that Harry Reid knows he doesn’t have 60 votes to pass anything, especially with huge votes on a possible government shutdown and the debt limit looming. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a physician who isn’t hostile to tighter regulation in this case, acknowledged to The New York Times that “it’s all politics”—which in this case means that no one has the stomach or stones to take another gun-related vote.
They did, however, have the stomach and stones to cast votes over the past few years that have sliced away at funding for mental-health services. Decreased federal grants have forced states to make massive cuts to mental-health services. The National Alliance on Mental Illness referred in 2011 to the “crisis” that has resulted from states’ slashing of mental-health programs. It’s of course mainly Republicans in Congress who pushed for those block-grant cuts. The sequester made things worse. While the sequester doesn’t affect Medicaid, which funds most mental-health services, the non-Medicaid mental-health services have taken a serious hit, including 103,000 fewer treatment admissions in 2013.
And the Republicans will have the stomach and stones to vote very soon here to defund the Affordable Care Act, which, says University of Chicago health-care expert Harold Pollack, “is the most important change to mental-health and substance-abuse policy in decades,” for two reasons. First, the expansion of Medicaid to all citizens with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line will mean that millions of people will be able to afford mental-health care who simply couldn’t before. And second, the ACA requires that coverage of mental illness and substance abuse be offered by insurers “at parity” to more traditional medical treatments. Up to now, these treatments have been more expensive, less likely to be covered, and so on.
Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee actually supported those particular provisions of the ACA on unanimous voice vote. So by that measure Republicans are “reasonable” on this issue. But final votes on legislation is where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where Republicans have voted and voted and voted—and will clearly continue to vote—to make sure that we have more potential mass murderers walking among us, listening to those voices until they can’t take it anymore and go out and slaughter innocents. It’s a party of nihilism that has no desire to solve any social problem, holding the rest of us hostage to its craziness as the bodies mount.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 20, 2013
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