Who's shaping public beliefs about health care?
by digby
Greg Sargent talks about a new national Journal poll that find a vast majority of Americans want to keep Medicare just as it is. But that's not all:
And yet the poll also finds that far more respondents think that Obamacare helps the poor than think it helps people like them. Sixty percent say the health law will make things better for people without insurance and for the poor. But only 45 percent say it will make things beter for the middle class, and only 43 percent say it will make things better for “people like you and your family.”
And there you have it. The Romney/Ryan game plan all along has been about painting Obama as the true threat to Medicare and themselves as its true defenders, in order to obscure the true nature of their ideological differences with Obama over the program’s future. After all, what they have actually proposed is deeply unpopular. And they have employed the suggestion that Obama is taking hard earned benefits away from seniors to expand health care to other people, because majorities do believe the law is all about helping the poor, and not helping them.
I think there's truth in Greg's analysis. Certainly the Republicans have made a fetish out of claiming Obamacare robs Medicare to pay for the you-know-whos. But there's another reason people believe this, which President Obama has stated over and over again:
If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.
The president repeatedly made it clear that if you were currently insured by your employer or one of those programs, nothing would change for you. I'd guess that many people heard that and believed him. Therefore, this huge new program must be for someone else.
I've always had mixed feelings about that tack. It's understandable since most people have pretty good insurance that you wouldn't want to scare them by saying hat everything's going to change. On the other hand, this idea that the hard working real Americans are subsidizing the parasites has a very long pedigree in American culture and it was dangerous to frame it that way.
In any case, it probably ended up accomplishing both things. People aren't scared they're going to lose what they have, but at the same time many also believe there's a big new "entitlement" for the uninsured and the poor. The Democrats should be thinking about this.
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