On first glance, this looks bad: According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, only 37 percent of Americans want ObamaCare repealed and replaced, as opposed to 61 percent who prefer that we "keep and improve" it. How could this happen? How could a law that has never been popular, has never worked well and has resulted in soaring premiums and collapsing insurance markets suddenly be popular?
Like I said, it appears that way on first glance, but if you think about the choices offered in the poll, you'll notice something:
As President Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress gear up for another attempt at repealing and replacing Obamacare, an ABC News/Washington Post poll finds broad public preference for keeping and improving it -- including high levels of support for some of its key components.
Just 37 percent of Americans in the national survey say Obamacare should be repealed and replaced; 61 percent say it should be kept and fixed instead. Even more broadly, the public by 79-13 percent says Trump should seek to make the current law work as well as possible, not to make it fail as soon as possible, a strategy he’s suggested.
These lopsidedly pro-Obamacare views are far different from the results of an ABC/Post poll in mid-January asking if Americans supported or opposed repealing Obamacare, 46-47 percent. That question did not offer “keeping and improving” it as an alternative -- and it was asked before the contours of the first failed effort to repeal the law were known.
This is a classic case of how you can get the polling result you want by asking the question in a particular way. Did you notice which choice was not offered to respondents? Why didn't ABC ask if ObamaCare should be kept exactly as it is? Because no one would choose that, and a massive rejection of that option would serve as evidence of what most people already know: ObamaCare has been a massive failure.
As you'll note from the three passages I bolded in the excerpt above, even ABC and the Post acknowledge that ObamaCare doesn't work. You don't have to fix something if it isn't broken. You don't have to improve it if it's working great.
Repeal-and-replace is still an option so why can't people choose it?
But wait, you say, how does that rig the poll? Repeal-and-replace is still an option so why can't people choose it?
They could. But understand something about people who respond to polls. First, most people don't follow the ins and outs of public policy, and most people are not ideological. Most people are more inclined toward moderation and problem-solving rather than ripping things up from their roots, just because that seems kind of extreme and it makes people nervous. Hey, if something's wrong but you can fix it, why wouldn't you want to do that?
The "keep and improve" choice almost a guaranteed poll winner because it assumes that ObamaCare can be fixed and improved. If you assume a bad law just needs to be improved and it will become a good law, who wouldn't be for that? What's more, it's hard to see what practical difference there is between "keep and improve" and "repeal and replace." Either way, you get rid of what you have now and replace it with something else. We're simply talking matters of degree.
Support Canada Free Press
If you really understand everything about ObamaCare, you know that the taxes and set-in-stone long-term spending make repeal the only way to fix it
So what ABC and the Post really showed with this polls is:
the matter of whether ObamaCare works in its present form has been decided overwhelmingly in the negative;
assuming the plausibility of fixing it, people would want to do that.
In other words, the poll told us nothing we couldn't easily figure out just by understanding basic human nature.
If you really understand everything about ObamaCare, you know that the taxes and set-in-stone long-term spending make repeal the only way to fix it. If the pollsters had told people details like this, then asked them what they thought would be the best way to "fix" ObamaCare, how do you think that would have impacted the results?
The media are trying pretty hard to sell the idea that people love ObamaCare and want to keep it. This polls seems at first glance to show that. But if you really look at it, you'll realize it shows exactly the opposite. Everyone knows ObamaCare doesn't work, and we're just quibbling now about how to clean up the mess.
