The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has released its latest tracking poll of the public’s view of the ACA. It’s a nice display which lets you lay out how long to show and breaks out the respondents in various demographics. For example, since the inception of the ACA, here’s the results for all adults as to whether their opinion of the ACA is favorable, unfavorable, or no opinion. The no opinions are dropping and the favorables appear to have a clear lead.
This one shows results for high-income folks.
Kevin Drum on Mother Jones sees this as close to victory for the pro-ACA forces:
In 2015, with Obamacare favorability languishing around 35-40 percent, repealing it wouldn’t have been too hard if President Obama himself hadn’t stood in the way. Today, Obama is gone but ACA’s favorability is 50-55 percent and rising. Even the rich favor keeping it around. There’s just not much appetite for destroying Obamacare anymore except among the tea party-ish base of the Republican Party.
I don’t know how far Donald Trump can go toward sabotaging Obamacare out of existence. Polls mean nothing to him in the face of getting revenge of Obama, and there’s obviously a lot of damage he can do. But can he do enough damage to wreck it for good before Democrats take over Congress or toss him out of the White House?
The Democrats must make it clear that, so long as the individual mandate is no longer part of the ACA, it’s no longer correct to call it ObamaCare. That individual mandate is the central mechanism that makes the whole jury-rigged contraption work, because, like any insurance, it’s the money from the the non-injured members which, to the extent possible, makes the injured parties whole again. If that individual mandate is not in place, then it’s
TrumpCare
And the Democrats need to trumpet that. TrumpCare means your healthcare costs go up! That needs to be an anchor around Trump’s neck, because then it can become an anchor around the jowly neck of every GOP candidate that has clasped Trump more tightly to their bosom than their own spouses – and that seems to be the trend these days in the GOP.
In my mind, one of the more pernicious trends of the current mid-term elections is the entire competition to be the most Trump-like and Trump-loyal partisan in the election. This is what leads to absolute corruption at the upper-most levels. There is a difference between sharing policy views, and loyalty to the Party leader (also known as team politics, of which I’ve written too much), and the latter is a poison in our water.
So I hope the Democrats can defeat every GOP candidate who’s frenching President Trump, if only in his dreams, and make it clear that this is not the American Way.
