White House bullish on Obamacare --- the public, not so much | WashingtonExaminer.com
The White House now argues that Obamacare is an asset rather than a liability after years of political headaches caused by President Obama's signature domestic initiative.
Such thinking, however, is not reflected in most measures of perceptions about the Affordable Care Act.
Though Obama insists public opinion is on his side, more Americans still disapprove of the law than support it.
A RealClearPolitics compilation of polls over the past month, for example, shows that 42 percent of Americans support the healthcare law, while more than 52 percent of respondents oppose it.
The best showing for Obamacare in recent weeks was a Reuters/Ipsos poll in which 46 percent of those surveyed favored the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the most sweeping overhaul of the healthcare system since the creation of Medicare in 1965. Even in that survey, 54 percent of Americans voiced opposition to the law.
At the other end, a Fox News poll earlier this month showed just 38 percent support for Obamacare, compared to 58 percent who dislike it.
White House officials are either ignoring those polls or dismissing them as irrelevant.
"What we have said is that the more that the American people understand the benefits that are associated with this law, the more people will approve of it, or at least the more that the approval of this will show up in polls," argued White House press secretary Josh Earnest. "But frankly, we're not concerned about the numbers in the polls. We're concerned about the numbers that demonstrate the impact of this law."
In other words, White House officials believe that negative perceptions about Obamacare are couched in partisanship rather than opinions of individual provisions of the law.
The White House tends to focus on the number of new insurance plan purchases — roughly 16.4 million Americans have gained health coverage since Obamacare was passed — or more popular parts of the law, such as a provision requiring that adults up to the age of 26 be allowed to stay on their parents' healthcare plans.
What the law's supporters tend to ignore, though, is that opinions of Obamacare have been fairly static since the Affordable Care Act was passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010. And they gloss over the continued rise in the cost of healthcare and the messier components of a law that Obama presented in rather simplistic terms at the onset of the debate over how to make medical coverage more accessible.
According to a plethora of polls, the Obamacare turnaround long promised by White House officials has never actually materialized. It is also unclear how public perceptions will change in the current tax season, which will be the first time Americans have to demonstrate they have a Washington-approved insurance plan or pay an additional tax.
What has changed is the rhetoric of the law's defenders.
After the drubbing in the November midterms, the president's top surrogates suggested that Obamacare was a negligible factor, saying Republicans chose to pursue different attacks against the White House because Americans were warming to the law.
They have since gone from insisting Obamacare is no albatross for Democrats to calling it a spark for progressive candidates. Obama's surrogates are regularly using the heath law as a line of attack.
"There continue to be Republicans across the country who are blocking the expansion of Medicaid in a way that literally prevents individuals in their states from getting badly needed healthcare coverage that would be 100 percent paid for by the federal government," Earnest said this week. "For the life of me, I can't understand why anybody would reach that conclusion. But some Republicans in this case are quite literally putting their political ambition against the lives of some people in their state. And that's a shame and that's unfortunate."
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic frontrunner for the 2016 presidential nomination, will likely attempt to adopt a similar message.
Republicans counter that any downplaying of Obamacare in the 2014 midterms was not tied to trepidation over bashing the healthcare law — they say that opinions were so hardened, it would have been a waste of resources to search for new converts.
Democrats have argued that the polls are misrepresentative of opinions about the Affordable Care Act. They say Republicans confuse misgivings over the health law with the belief that voters wanted it repealed altogether, rather than adjusted.
But conservatives see little downside in trying to gut Obamacare. And they say that opposition to the law could grow as Americans file their taxes and are forced to deal with new Obamacare complications.
Far from backing down, House Republicans unveiled a budget Tuesday that would both repeal Obamacare and roll back its expansion of Medicaid.
And GOP pollsters say the president and his allies are tone deaf on the issue.
"They have a tin ear about the confusion, frustration and downright antipathy towards the law," said Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway. "They live in a parallel universe where the country loves Obamacare and it's working. The president has now turned his full attention to legacy building, wanting Obamacare to read well in the Wikipedia entry."
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