Does Obamacare politics make smart people stupid?

This is an update to an earlier post (below) about a new survey that shows the vast majority of Obamacare enrollees are satisfied with their coverage.

Ezra Klein of Vox sees the new poll as a vindication for the Affordable Care Act but he looks at the state of Obamacare from a different perspective.

Despite a terrible start, with messy rollout of  healthcare.gov, the current ACA status, Klein reports, is this:  the Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare will cut the ranks of the uninsured by 17 million in 2015; it will  cost more than $100 billion less than originally anticipated; enrollees are quite happy with their coverage; and health-care spending is growing more slowly than it has since the 1960s, a trend Obamacare can't take full credit for, but that it hasn't interrupted, and is likely helping along.

Those are the facts. But the extraordinary story of the ACA is that Americans on the left and right, especially members of Congress, continue to cherry-pick facts. As a result, very few people, even those who are pleased with their Obamacare Marketplace policy, have changed their opinions about the historic healthcare reforms.

 

Worse yet, polls continue to show that the general public, not those who have gone through the enrollment process, are still confused about the law five years after its passage. In fact, only 19 percent of Americans think what they hear in the news about Obamacare is even "mostly true."

Bottom line: Much of what Americans know about Obamacare is simply wrong.

Here’ Klein’s interpretation from today’s column:

“Obamacare is an example of a depressing fact of American politics: more information doesn't change minds.
“Social scientists have tested this again and again. The more information partisans get, the deeper their disagreements become. When it comes to politics, people reason backward from their conclusions. Politics makes smart people stupid.
“Consider how much we've learned about Obamacare in the last five years — and how few elected officials have changed their minds about it. We know how many people it's covering and how much its premiums are costing and how badly healthcare.gov was designed and how high the deductibles are and how narrow the networks are becoming and how happy people are with their insurance.

But congressional Democrats and Republicans all remain stuck in the days of 2009-10 when opinions were formed and hardened. No one has re-evaluated the ACA.

“If anything," Klein added, “the opposite has happened. In a last-ditch effort to wound Obamacare by wrecking it in Republican states (through the Supreme Court), conservatives have begun developing a bizarro-earth history of the law — one in which Congress built federal exchanges for the sole purpose of ruining insurance markets in recalcitrant states. Five years later, it is not just opinions on Obamacare's worth that have diverged. The two sides can't even agree on what the law says or the history of how it was passed.”

*****

Time for GOP to move on:
Satisfaction with Obamacare sky high    
(Posted May 21, 2015)

The days of national debate over Obamacare may be over. The Republicans may want to move on to other issues.The most comprehensive survey yet of Obamacare enrollees finds that the vast majority are happy with their insurance plans. The Kaiser Family Foundation poll released today found that three-quarters of those with Marketplace coverage from Affordable Care Act rate their overall coverage as excellent or good. Only 7 percent say it’s poor.
When the survey drilled down it found that at least seven in ten say they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with their plan’s choice of primary care doctors, hospitals, co-pays for doctor’s visits, and prescription coverage. About two-thirds say they are satisfied with their choice of specialists.
Clearly, the mess created by the disastrous healthcare.gov rollout is long gone.
A large majority of those who renewed an ACA plan this year told KFF that it was very or somewhat easy to renew. About half were automatically re-enrolled, while 46 percent say they took action to renew – and in some cases modify -- their coverage.
In addition, most enrollees say their initial shopping for the right plan was easy.
However, the survey is not all good news for President Obama’s health care reforms.
Those with high-deductible plans are much less satisfied with their ACA insurance than other enrollees. And, like nearly everything else in America these days, a partisan political divide tilts the scales.
Despite the widespread satisfaction with the Marketplace system, when politics was thrown into the mix 55 percent of Republican enrollees say they still have a “very unfavorable” view of the ACA while 45 percent  of Democrats proclaim a “very favorable” view.
Sarah Kliff of Vox explains those numbers this way: “The law, for many, has become a proxy for what people think about President Obama, and less about what the health reform law actually does.”