Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Support for Obamacare Dwindling
Support for Obamacare Dwindling
Dec 20, 2025 3:29 AM

Obamacare, the popular name for the Affordable Health Care Act, continues to find opposition from both individuals and states. The act is scheduled to take effect on October 1, 2013 for most of the country, but a USA Today/Pew Research poll finds that 53 percent of Americans polled oppose Obamacare. The numbers are even lower when one accounts for political parties.

Overall, just 13% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents approve of the law while 85% disapprove. Fewer than half of all Republicans and Republican leaners (43%) want elected officials who oppose the law to do what they can to make it fail; 37% say they should try to make it work as well as possible.

53% disapprove of the health care law, the highest level since it was signed; 42% approve. By an even wider margin, intensity favors the opposition; 41% of those surveyed strongly disapprove while just 26% strongly approve. Fifty-three percent disapprove of Obama’s handling of health care policy, an historic high.

The poll also shows that there is a great deal of confusion about the law, especially about whether or not health care exchanges are available in one’s state. As of September 6, 2013, 16 states have chosen not to participate in the health care exchange, and 7 more are leaning in that direction. 20 states are currently set to participate. Also, many people were also not aware that the law requires them to get health insurance if they currently are uninsured.

The Obama administration is also relying heavily on young adults participating in this act, but the recent poll shows that many (44 percent) aren’t aware that they will be required to have health insurance.

In addition, a number of large employeers have announced that they are dropping health care for their employees. Trader Joe’s, UPS, and the University of Virginia are three large employers that have decided to stop or alter their health care plans due to Obamacare.

According to Joseph Antos, one of the biggest issues Obamacare faces in selling itself to the public is the “paperwork gauntlet” es with the health care exchanges.

With so many official and unofficial helpers, it will be difficult to know whose advice to trust. The navigators, considered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to have a “vital role in helping consumers,” will only have 20 hours of training on the mechanics of applying for insurance with little or no emphasis on the different policies that are available. Many applicants are likely to enroll this fall in insurance plans they don’t understand, only to find out in January, when the coverage begins, that they made an expensive mistake.

In addition, sensitive personal information is at risk of promised, and there is no assurance that HHS can prevent it. Critical information, including social security numbers and details of employment, must be reported on the exchange application. Many applicants, unaware of the potential for fraud, will give that information to the person helping plete the form.

No one should be surprised when widespread problems are reported during the first few weeks of exchange operation. Oregon announced that its online insurance exchange will not be made available to the public until at least the middle of October, giving the state more time to iron out problems. California has warned that its online enrollment process could be delayed. Other states are likely to follow suit when it es clear puter systems are not ready for prime time.

The federal government, which will run exchanges in 34 states, faces similar problems. HHS has admitted that it is behind in testing its data systems, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned that exchanges may not be ready in all states by October.

Rep. Diane Black, Republican from Tennessee, believes that as time goes on, there will be even more opposition to the health care act:

Once this actually starts impacting people in their real lives, in their everyday life — ‘My rates are going up; my full-time job is ing a part-time job because of Obamacare’ — once all of that starts happening, that’s a negative.”

Read more about the Pew Research Center’s poll here.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Acton on Tap: Artists, Storytellers and Conservatives
Join us on Wednesday, May 19, for the next Acton on Tap and a fascinating discussion about conservatives and the arts. The discussion will be led by David Michael Phelps, a writer, producer and story consultant. The event takes place from 6-8 p.m. at the Derby Station in East Grand Rapids, Mich. (Map it here.) No advance registration is required. The only cost is your food and drink. View event details on Facebook. Background: Both Story and Syllogism. (Excerpted from...
Digging in to the crimes of communism
Having recently finished reading Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia – in which he excoriates leftist intellectuals for ignoring the crimes munist totalitarianism and their efforts to resurrect the deadly ideology – and having just read a few more chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago over lunch, it seems providential that I would stumble across this article at City Journal on the failure of researchers to seriously dig into the now-available archives of the Soviet Union: Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile...
Debt, Credit and the Virtuous Life
This week’s Acton Commentary: Our economic life is concerned with more than just the objective exchange of goods and services. Far from being morally neutral, it is an expression of how we understand our dependence on God and neighbor and is the means by which we fulfill, or not, our obligations toward them. Both for reasons of morality as well as long term economic efficiency, we cannot overlook or minimize the centrality of personal virtue, and of a culture of...
Debt and Politics
Though the Greek Debt crisis may seem far away, here is a sobering article by Kevin Hassett at Bloomberg. Greece’s Bailout Heroes arrive in Leaking Boats Those countries coordinating the $1Trillion bailout of Greece find themselves in similar trouble. Hassett writes: The fatal flaw in the plan is that the European nations bailing out Greece — even Germany, where government debt has risen to about 80 percent of gross domestic product — have similar budget problems and even less political...
How’s that universal health care working out for you?
From the movie Fight Club (1999): Narrator: Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I’ve ever met… see I have this thing: everything on a plane is single-serving… Tyler Durden: Oh I get it, it’s very clever. Narrator: Thank you. Tyler Durden: How’s that working out for you? Narrator: What? Tyler Durden: Being clever. The Hill reports that Dems feel healthcare fatigue. Blue Dog Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), who voted for the health overhaul, said the debate has...
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
I want to second Marc’s article mendation from earlier today. The phrase “a must read” is badly overworked, but in this case I can’t help myself: Claire Berlinski’s A Hidden History of Evil in the latest City Journal is a must-read. A few excerpts: Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history. For evidence of this indifference, consider the...
Bottle Deposits and Behavior
I have taken an unofficial and unplanned hiatus from PowerBlogging over the last few weeks as I worked toward finishing up a book manuscript that you’ll hear much more about in ing days. But in the meantime, I did continue to take note of things that might be of interest to PowerBlog readers, and one of these things was a recent NBER working paper, “Discontinuous Behavioral Responses to Recycling Laws and Plastic Water Bottle Deposits.” I noted it in part...
Secularism is Swell: Harvard Political Review and Me
I did an interview with the Harvard Political Review several weeks ago. The story is largely a paean to secularism. Steven Pinker even takes credit for democracy as an achievement of secularists. I know. That’s the history you get from an evolutionary psychologist. To the author’s credit, I was certainly treated fairly. I only wish she’d offered more of our interview to her readers. For those who would like to read it, I have posted it in full over at...
Wealth: What is it good for?
On the Economix blog at the New York Times, Uwe E. Reinhardt wrote a post titled “How Businesses Create Wealth.” That elicited attention from menter who wondered where he was “trying to go with this essay.” Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton, answers with “Companies: What Are They Good For?” He also cites an article from Acton’s Journal of Markets & Morality: “A Communitarian Model of Business: A Natural-Law Perspective.” Reinhardt: Actually, I was not trying to go anywhere with...
Interview: Economics and the Reality of Things
A while back, Bevan Sabo and Ariel Goldring at Free Market Mojo interviewed me on a wide range of subjects. They’ve kindly granted us permission to post some excerpts: FMM: Capitalism requires a large degree of selfishness. Though there is certainly room for charity in a free-market system, individuals and firms must pursue their own selfish interests in order for an economy to thrive (or even succeed). How does a Christian love his neighbor as himself and still function as...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved