Uninsured Skeptical of Health Care Law in Poll
Source: NY Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and ALLISON KOPICKI
WASHINGTON Americans who lack medical coverage disapprove of President Obamas health care law at roughly the same rate as the insured, even though most say they struggle to pay for basic care, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
Fifty-three percent of the uninsured disapprove of the law, the poll found, compared with 51 percent of those who have health coverage. A third of the uninsured say the law will help them personally, but about the same number think it will hurt them, with cost a leading concern.
The widespread skepticism, even among people who are supposed to benefit from the law, underscores the political challenge facing the Obama administration as it tries to persuade millions of Americans to enroll in coverage through new online marketplaces, a crucial element of making the new law financially viable for insurers.
There are several reasons the uninsured appear to be as wary of the law as the insured, including opposition to the requirement that most people have insurance. Still, nearly six in 10 uninsured said having insurance would make their own health better. And 56 percent said they were more likely than not to get insurance by March 31, the deadline to enroll in coverage or face a tax penalty under the law. Thirty-five percent said they were more likely to pay the penalty.
FULL story at link.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/us/uninsured-americans-are-about-as-skeptical-of-health-care-law-as-the-insured-poll-finds.html?partner=EXCITE&ei=5043&_r=0
SHRED
(28,136 posts)What a bunch of idiots.
CTyankee
(63,903 posts)their hands when confronted with an unworkable website, and add to their financial burdens or instill fear that such insurance WOULD add to their financial burdens? I wish the ACA had been better explained and presented to the young American public.
JoePhilly
(27,787 posts)LiberalFighter
(50,888 posts)That should make them feel safe.
LynneSin
(95,337 posts)If they can't overturn Obamacare then they are going to frighten the bejesus out of those people who have no healthcare so they are too scared to sign up.
Thing is this - everyday I read about stories of people who now have healthcare coverage and it's far cheaper than what they had before (If they were even able to get coverage because of pre-existing conditions).
How many lives has the GOP put at Risk by convincing uninsured people it's better to go without health insurance?
CTyankee
(63,903 posts)but surely we could all see this coming. The young invincibles never had to get insurance before if they didn't want it and they just went to the Emergency Room if they got sick or were in an accident.
Pretty shocking to see the attitude that it's your "consitutional freedom of choice" not to have health insurance! Where does THAT come from?
HHS should have seen this coming and tried harder to educate this difficult to convince group of people. The kid in the pajamas ad was indicative of some weird mindset about branding a "product."
I don't know for sure, but I think HHS officials and the White House thought that "everyone" would welcome the ACA with open arms. This polling shows how wrong they were...
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)The only way the needle gets moved is by the law's performance as it affects people individually.
bigdarryl
(13,190 posts)People are signing up in droves.The polling companies ask questions the way they want it answered because a lot of them have an agenda http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/18/1263785/-Here-Comes-the-Boom-ACA-enrollments-up-to-MINIMUM-of-21K-per-day
seabeckind
(1,957 posts)wanna bet which poll is in the paper?
Gman
(24,780 posts)in discouraging people from taking advantage of something that can help these people. There's probably a lot of poor whites in the survey.
CTyankee
(63,903 posts)It's difficult to require people to buy something they never HAD to buy in the past. That is what should have been anticipated because unfamiliarity with the new thing plus RW propaganda has left many with a negative impression. I don't believe it is fatal to the ACA but it sure didn't help and could haave been rolled out better...
seabeckind
(1,957 posts)I was impressed by this voice of reason in the article:
"It will hurt everybody in the long run, said Cat Ping, 55, of Indianapolis in a follow-up interview. Ms. Ping, who does not have insurance, added: I dont care how they spin it, Obamacare is not affordable. Its wrecking our total economy."
I was even more impressed by the idiot reporter who used it as an example of why. It's obvious the woman was indoctrinated by the "unbiased" media outlets here. The article could have been slanted to show that there is some disinformation being pushed in this country, particularly where there is no progressive voice.
What good is spending the money to educate the ignorati when they never hear it or if they do refuse to believe it. And believe me, in this state they are unlikely to hear anything except the right wing screamers and the gop mouthpieces.
Only thing that gets published around here are Obama hate messages. 2 or 3 a week in the local rag.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obamacare-shotgun-wedding-marry-lose-091500078.html
..."unintended consequences"..... when complex solutions turn out to be poorly designed and incompetently administered.....The rollout of the Affordable Care Act has provided many real-world examples of this, but perhaps none so unintended as the consequences discovered by the Seattle Times this weekend. Carol Ostrom, The Times health reporter, told the story of 62-year-old newlyweds Sofia Prins and Gary Balhorn, who werent exactly the models of wild, starry-eyed romantics. Their nuptials were motivated by a stronger desire to keep their house out of the hands of the federal government, thanks to a little-known key provision of Obamacare. Their meager incomes made them eligible for a federally subsidized health plan, and their assets would be protected.
Does Obamacare actually allow the federal government to seize homes and other assets? Before answering that question, lets go back to what supposedly motivated the Obama administration and Democrats to pass the ACA in the first place. For years, Democrats had demanded federal action to address the problem of Americans without health insurance coverage. Estimates of this population went from 14 million to 40 million during the debate in 2009-10 over the scope of the crisis and potential solutions for it. While those numbers sound large, a Gallup poll in late 2009 put them in better perspective, noting that 85 percent of American adults had health insurance, 87 percent of whom were satisfied with their coverage, and 61 percent satisfied with the costs. Even among the uninsured, half were satisfied with their situation, although only 27 percent expressed satisfaction about their costs for health care.
Instead of designing a solution that focused on the half of the 15 percent who needed better options and leaving everyone else alone, Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill insisted on imposing an overhaul of the entire health-insurance industry. This includes, crucially, an unprecedented individual mandate to carry health-insurance coverage. The ACA contains a highly-complex series of subsidies that help working-class Americans pay the now-skyrocketing premiums caused by coverage mandates on insurers, but only down to a certain income level. Below that point, Americans who do not have employer-based coverage have to accept Medicaid coverage in order to comply with the Obamacare individual mandate, or pay full price for the skyrocketing premiums from private-sector insurers. People often confuse Medicaid with Medicare, but there is a critical difference between the two programs. Medicare eligibility derives from Social Security contributions, and is a true entitlement program. Theoretically, coverage comes as part of the funds paid into the system, although in reality the federal government has to borrow billions of dollars to cover the costs....Medicaid, on the other hand, is a state-based and federally-subsidized welfare program, one that employs means-testing which includes ownership of assets as well as income levels. Medicaid programs include conditions that put recipients assets remaining after death at risk for seizure to reimburse taxpayers who footed the bill for the recipients health care during his/her lifetime. This was done to prevent fraud, to ensure that limited resources went to the truly needy, and to recapture resources to cover future costs. Until now, though, Medicaid was a voluntary program, and the vast majority of people who entered into it had few assets to risk by signing up.
Heres where the law of unintended consequences comes into Obamacare. Thanks to the exchange programming, consumers are getting enrolled in Medicaid whether they understand what that means or not, and in much greater numbers than before. (In the first month, nearly 90 percent of all the enrollees in the federal and state exchanges were Medicaid applicants.) Unless they look at the fine print in the paperwork in Washington and other states with similar asset-forfeiture regulations, any assets they own will not pass to their heirs but to the state instead....Thats one of the problems of Obamacare itself the perception that its a free lunch. Even those who do qualify for subsidies get that only through the collection of a myriad of taxes imposed by Obamacare. Those taxes apply to employers, insurers, and medical-device manufacturers, which drive up the costs for consumers and workers in indirect ways. Its a shell game--not a reform that actually drives costs down. Instead Obamacare only masks price increases through dishonest opacity. The problem here is the arrogance of the solution itself. Had the Obama administration focused on just those who could not get coverage because of income or pre-existing conditions, they could have expanded Medicaid in an intelligent manner while protecting existing assets, without disrupting the rest of the market...
AND THEN WE WOULDN'T HAVE PEOPLE CLAMORING FOR UNIVERSAL SINGLE PAYER RIGHT OUT OF THE GATE, EITHER....
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)"..skyrocketing premiums..."
That right there makes the rest of it totally suspect, as it is a complete fabrication, an outright lie.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)The ACA plan she got is one of the better ones but she pays $200 a month and a $1000 copay. The problem has been that she has never had to pay before when she was poor and expected more. Her mother helped her and when she started throwing a fit my daughter pulled out the insurance plan that she had paid for all these years. My granddaughter took one look and shut up.
To the uninsured who are worried - I say to go in and take a look. The worst that can happen is that you will not find anything that you want.
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)Are yet to be spent. Held back by a glitchy website that could not have handled the load and demand created by those unspent millions is now being unleashed as the website is now fixed and can handle the traffic....logic is too wonderful for the mass media to dare use even occasionally and students of history they are not.
Anyone who understands the history of the Part D and Romneycare rollouts gets it. The insurance companies get it and the advertising coming for signups will soon be a tidal wave.
Ikonoklast
(23,973 posts)to roll out after the first of the year, as they fight among themselves to offer better products at lower costs to the wave of people signing up.
One panelist even ventured to say that prices on health insurance offerings will get lowered even further as the intense competition for new customers heats up exponentially.
Everyone else already signed up just might come out even bigger winners overall, and can find an even better plan at a even lower price.
cynzke
(1,254 posts)are not about to let this opportunity pass. They are going to be competing against each other and prices will begin to lower. Especially for those people in a higher income bracket that do not qualify for a subsidy. The insurance companies will be offering alternatives for these people competing against the public exchange plans. Have already seen blog comments from people who did not qualify for a subsidy and found cheaper insurance plans in the private market.
TheKentuckian
(25,023 posts)The insistence that health care is a rational market is bordering on the insane.
This isn't cellphones and blue jean, folks. Pretending that it is will lead to heartache and pain because it is no more true than the sun rising in the west or winter following spring.
Xithras
(16,191 posts)A large portion of the uninsured in this country are the young and healthy who COULD afford insurance before, but chose not to simply because it's usually a waste of money at that point in your life. For the vast majority of young people, any health insurance beyond Major Medical is usually a poor use of funds.
Rather than implement a fair and equitable health system that underwrote the costs using tax dollars to equally spread the costs of a national healthcare program across all Americans, the ACA saddled those young and healthy voters with the majority of the cost burden. They are being forced to subsidize private corporate profits because the insurance companies whined about the losses they would take if they had to insure the previously uninsurable. It's understandable why they wouldn't support the ACA.
Where I work (just outside of the Silicon Valley in the SF Bay Area) I've noticed an interesting split among my coworkers. The fulltime employees like me who get the paid company healthcare plan and will never have to deal with the cost increases or the exchanges generally support the ACA. Among our hordes of contract workers, who don't qualify for any company benefits, it's more like 80-20...with the vast majority opposed to it. Most are younger (sub-35) techie types who make a decent middle class income (small or no subsidies) and pay for their insurance entirely out of their own pockets, and most are either being forced to buy insurance for the first time or are seeing price increases because of it. They're not a happy bunch of people (which isn't great, as most of them are Democrats).
christx30
(6,241 posts)Yeah it's great to have insurance if you get sick, or you need it. But if you don't, then it's a waste of money. Like being legally forced to buy a $200 lottery ticket each month. If you are young and healthy, you probably won't win. But you still have to pay that money for nothing. It's just gone. Forever.
I paid for insurance all year. Never saw the inside of a doctor's office. I can't use what I paid for next year or the year after if something happens. That money is just wasted.
snot
(10,520 posts)we hadn't allowed the consolidation of 95% of traditional media in the hands of conservatives.
I keep wondering whether Dems might eventually realize there's a problem . . .
JoeyT
(6,785 posts)they're comfortably (and sometimes presumably uncomfortably) ignorant, and choosing to remain so.