President Obama will never have to face the voters again, so we will never get to see how the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will change people’s opinion of him. For example, the president never fared particularly well with white working class voters. Yet, they are going to be some of the prime beneficiaries of ObamaCare. Recent polling shows the potential for tremendous gains for the Democrats among segments of the electorate who seem generally unaware of the “gifts” the president prepared for them:
Seventy-eight percent of the uninsured Americans who are likely to qualify for subsidies were unfamiliar with the new coverage options in a survey by Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners. That survey, sponsored by the nonprofit Enroll America, also found that 83 percent of those likely to qualify for the expansion of Medicaid, which is expected to cover 12 million Americans, were unaware of the option.
What people have heard about is the mandate which requires people to acquire health insurance. They have basically no clue, however, about how ObamaCare makes health care insurance affordable.
Enroll America held focus groups in Philadelphia in mid-November, working exclusively with those who probably would qualify for benefits. Looking to understand how much public education will be needed, the researchers came back with a simple answer: a lot.
Participants’ hands shot up when researchers asked whether they had heard about a requirement to buy health insurance. But when asked about whether they had heard about any provisions that might make insurance more affordable, none of the 31 participants in the four groups answered yes.
Barack Obama just won about 85% of the vote in Philadelphia despite the nearly universal ignorance about how ObamaCare is going to help the working class. People are no better informed in mountainous West Virginia or rural Arkansas. Once they find out the details, they are going to be extremely grateful.
Think about Boone County, West Virginia. It is 98.5% white and 22% of its residents are living in poverty. The median income for a household is $25,669. In 2012, the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) is set at $11,170 for a one-person household and rises by $3,960 for each additional family member. Thus, the FPL for a four-person family in 2012 is $23,050. I think we can surmise from these numbers that a very high percentage of the families in Boone County are going to be eligible for health care subsidies in the highest range.
People and families earning 133 percent of FPL, for example, will have to pay only 2 percent of their income toward the health insurance premium.
In Boone County, a family of four making the median income of $25,669 will only have to pay two percent of their income ($513/annually) toward a $10,000 health insurance plan. The government will also cover 94% of their out-of-pocket expenses. President Obama only received 32.9% of the vote in Boone County. I think candidate Biden or Cuomo or Clinton or Warner or whomever else will have a good shot at improving that number.
When Mitt Romney talked about the president winning the election by giving out gifts, he was wrong. Almost no one understand that they would be receiving gifts of this magnitude. If they had understood it, they would have told Romney to take his promise to repeal ObamaCare and shove it up his ass. I believe this is true in small, white, rural counties all over America.
I think John Boehner agrees with me, which is why he is still talking about destroying ObamaCare. When you take a poor, white family of four living in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia and you give them $9,500 a year to make sure they all have health insurance and you cover 94% of their out of pocket health care expenses, you have effectively counter-programmed the crap they’ve been seeing on Fox News. You want a new New Deal coalition? Here it comes.
How does this play out in the context of the SCOTUS decision that the states don’t have to expand Medicaid, and the efforts of GOP governors to stonewall the new law, as described at TPM earlier this week?
Well, I think you can imagine.
Let’s say that went to the Texas exchange for air travel on the internet and you typed in your age and income and flight details and it came back telling you that you are eligible for a free ticket but because you live in Texas, you cannot have a plane ticket at all.
That’s basically what will happen. You will type in your information into the federally-run Texas exchange and it will tell you that you are eligible for Medicaid but because Rick Perry refuses to accept the federal money to pay for this, you cannot get health insurance on the exchange.
Meanwhile, Texas still has to pay for their uninsured (at least, indirectly) and they are leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table that will go to other states instead.
The Texas hospitals will be pissed. The pharmaceutical companies will be pissed. The doctors and nurses will be pissed. The Catholic Church will be pissed. The do-gooder organizations will be pissed. The people without health insurance will be pissed. The people who have to balance the Texas budget will be pissed.
Good luck with that.
Booman Tribune ~ Comments ~ ObamaCare Will Reshape the Electorate
But will the family actually KNOW they are receiving a gift of $9,500 plus 94% of their out of pocket health care expenses because of Obamacare, or will they believe it is because of a Republican state run exchange, or will the GOP then claim they would have done better under Romney’s plan, or that it is all a conspiracy to make them dependent on the Guvment and will undermine their freedom?
Never under-estimate:
If ever there was a reason and a need and an opportunity for OFA to morph into a Dem organisation for the Mid-terms – this is it. To counteract counter-factual campaigns and build an organisation on genuine self-interest.
You’ve certainly got a point. On the other hand, it is now known as “Obamacare” — thanks, ironically, to its enemies.
Let’s just say it ought to give Democratic candidates something to work with.
Let’s just say it ought to give Democratic candidates something to work with.
Or against. As many Blue Dogs, and other bad Democrats, are running as fast as possible from it despite it being corporate welfare. Is Manchin supporting ObamaCare? Their “Democratic” Governor?
Obamacare will reshape the electorate.
I suppose it is an open-ended question as to whether those who had up until this month run against Obamacare will continue to do so over the next couple years. Is the motivation to do so still intact? Or, has the political landscape now essentially changed (or about to change) such that the motivation to do so no longer exists, or at best only minimally exists? I don’t know the answer to that. If I were to bet, I suppose I’d be betting on the latter, but admittedly that’s a hunch on my part based on only the thinnest of evidence (I’d like to see more than one post-election poll showing a weakening of opposition toward the ACA).
Will people who get employer provided insurance get any subsidies or only people in the private market? That’s the biggest thing I’m unsure about the new law as I’ve seen both answers out there.
That is an excellent question.
If you get employer-provided health insurance then you will not be eligible for subsidies. However, if you work for a company that has more than 50 full-time employees, you will be eligible for the exchange and subsidies if your company’s insurance is either too expensive relative to your income or their plan does not meet the minimum requirements. They will also be fined.
It’s ridiculous that people with employer health insurance are still held hostage to the current system. In my company, our insurance is basically just disaster coverage, with 5k deductables. We are in Minnesota and aren’t allowed to use the Mayo Clinic because it’s too “fancy” (even though it’s the most cost-effective healthcare system in the US). I’d much rather be in the exchange if my employer put the same amount of money toward that, even if I wasn’t eligible for subsidies.
That needs to be fixed in the next few years. Let companies between 50 and 2000 employees buy into the exchange to offer their employees more choice and better benefits. My employer would jump at the chance, I’m quite sure of that.
Oh hell, let everyone buy into the exchange….
It’s a trade-off. You may be paying as little as one-third of what you’d have to pay on the individual market. Try shopping for insurance and see what rate you get at various deductible and co-insurance rates and you will see what I mean.
Why wouldn’t a company get their insurance thru the exchange when it will be cheaper and better>
That’s not the way the law is currently written, as I understand it.
That’s really silly. Even if that’s the case, a company would be better off cancelling their existing policies in order to qualify for buying it on the exchange.
The expected outcome during the debates was employers pushing people out onto the exchanges by cancelling their health insurance benefits altogether–accelerating a trend that has been going on for three decades.
There is much that is silly in the legislation. It is what it is, and there are a few poison pills placed in it by supposedly friendly Democrats.
The optimistic case is that those get dealt with one or a few at a time as people experience the illogic.
It isn’t necessarily cheaper. But, in any case, the point of the exchanges is create a pool for people who aren’t covered by their employer or who don’t even have an employer. It isn’t supposed to replace employer-provided health care. In fact, the law specifically penalizes large companies that don’t provide adequate affordable health care to their employees.
And that’s the problem. My comany (300 employees) can’t get anything resembling decent health insurance at this points. We have employees who earn 35k a year who have 7,000 deductables on their family policies.
What about the spouses of those people? They can in theory get health insurance through spouses work but of course, it’s too costly to do it.
I have been trying to figure this out to no avail. My employer is switching from a PPO to a high deductible plan, with no contribution by my employer to an HSA.
I am at about 240% of poverty level, full-time, unionized with benefits. But we haven’t had raises for several years, and expenses keep going up.
For people with small paychecks and no remaining savings, a high deductible plan is a looming disaster.
As near as I can tell, it is only high premiums that might enable some assistance towards an employer plan. But the high deductible plan has no premiums. However, every single dime of medical expenses has to be paid for up front until the deductible is met. 100% of office visits, lab work, radiology, prescriptions, etc. No coverage at all.
I just don’t have thousands of dollars available to cover those expenses. A relatively simple office visit that required some lab work and a prescription could easily be several hundred dollars.
Of course, John Boehner agrees with you on this. That’s what making Obamacare the President’s “Waterloo”, to quote Jim DeMint, was all about.
Democrats, especially Blue Dog Democrats from the very states and districts that would most benefit are one reason that people have not been educated about the details of the bill. They have spent four years running away from this bill, and they continue this self-defeating strategy. It delegitimizes the legislation and it doesn’t remove the D label from their jersey. And their actions legitimize the media’s blackout on describing the benefits because the media tends to invite Blue Dogs as the Democratic voice on their talk shows.
The legislation itself–everyone knows it was 2100 pages–is a problem in education just from its complexity. Medicare for All is a much simpler concept to grasp.
State governments have had varying responses to setting up exchanges, and no one knows how much latitude they have in setting the subsidy amounts. Like Medicaid, the value could vary dramatically from state to state. And most folks don’t have a clue about what an exchange is.
Many employers and employer-contracted health insurance sales staffs have been pushing disinformation about Obamacare for their own self-serving reasons.
And the President from the beginning has not done a good job of explaining the whole program, concentrating instead on the immediately implementable, easy-to-grasp provisions like end to denials for pre-existing conditions, rescissions of coverage, annual and lifetime limits. And the inclusion of young adults on their parents’ coverage up to age 18. Not even a lot about the limits on the medical loss ratio that has already saved folks money.
FDR owned American politics for a generation and a half because the New Deal legislation ended an agricultural depression and provided opportunities for folks to leave the farm and find work, created labor standards that both improved incomes but also increased the demand for labor (work hour and overtime laws).
Republicans clearly know that the current situation means that Obama has the political environment in which to do the same thing. Thus the viciousness, huge sums of money, and massive media blitzkrieg to try to prevent that legislation from being set in place.
This is an interesting analysis. Similar estimates should be run for Cimmaron Co. OK, Rich Co. UT, and Yalobusha Co. MS. The quant’s dream on this would be to see estimates for all the counties–and for Congressional Districts.
Correction: Age 26. A HUGE difference.
Dang. Senility strikes young. Yes, of course it’s 26.
I already had this thanks to unions. Of course once I hit 27 I couldn’t afford insurance any more. Still can’t. 2014 still a long way away.
I had until age 22, four more years is a plus.
“Democrats, especially Blue Dog Democrats from the very states and districts that would most benefit are one reason that people have not been educated about the details of the bill.”
I can’t speak for all Blue Dog districts, but I can speak for one, and it was the district of one of the bluest dogs in the house, Chet Edwards — Texas C.D. 17. Edwards voted against the act, though I believe it was one of those amicable no’s — Pelosi could spare a few votes.
A day or two after the ACA was passed back in June 2010, Edwards held a town meeting by phone to answer questions. The part I heard of it was very civilized on all sides. He answered the questions (they were mostly pretty simple, since nobody knew much) and made a point of telling folks to call his office where they would gladly answer any further questions anybody might have.
Of course we will never know what would have happened next, since, after surviving a vicious gerrymander in the previous election, Edwards lost to a tea Party candidate in 2010.
I’m not suggesting Edwards would have run on it — far from it. That would be suicide in his district. I am suggesting that if he were still serving, he would educate his constituents to get the most out of it.
It was the conventional wisdom at the time that running on it was suicide. It sounds like he wasted a Town Meeting trying to straddle rather than to inform folks from the inside what was in the bill and what was likely to pass and getting their input.
This is a classic example of the failure of politics because of the competitive marketing and astrotufing practiced by both parties. A major reason for the political dysfunction. No one really listens in depth to voters. No one tests legislation in depth with voters. In the sense of having a political conversation.
And voters hate it, so they hate Washington.
Until that changes, Democrats will remain in big trouble.
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. The town meeting was held just AFTER the bill was passed. The point I was trying to make was, at least in this case, the fact that Edwards didn’t vote for it did NOT mean he was reluctant to educate his constituents about its benefits. And remember, he wasn’t giving a speech, he was just taking questions.
It’s funny, but although Edwards was a Blue Dog, he was very much a Democrat in this highly conservative district.
I contrast this with Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican in SC-04 opposed to the ACA, who started a Town Hall meeting prior to passage with a Powerpoint presentation of what was in the bill. He got shouted down by Tea Party participants because he didn’t legitimize their “death panel” narrative. And was later sucessfully primaried out of office by Trey Gowdy.
That is what we are up against. Just taking questions that have been seeded by the opposition through media stunts doesn’t educate people as to what is in the bill. It just legitimizes through silence the astroturfing by focusing on the elements the opposition has already framed.
And this has been the case on issue after issue.
And I don’t understand how someone who was opposed to the ACA for “going too far” can be considered “very much a Democrat”. That is a classic example of what I am referring to as the political malpractice of establishment Democrats. And it is exactly what has killed the institutional Democratic Party in Texas.
Labeling a district a “highly conservative district” is a form of victimism. I grew up in a Congressional District in South Carolina that was pro-labor, pro-New Deal, pro-education, and pro-science. There were only two areas that one could say the district was conservative–segregation and national defense. Today that district is represented by the above-mentioned Trey Gowdy. The last moderately progressive Democratic governor of South Carolina, Richard Riley, came from that district.
What happened? These things. A lot of hard work by Republicans in terms of organizing local turnout, something Democrats took for granted after so many years of one-party (Democratic) rule. The bundling of racism, anti-abortion, anti-gay, and religious “culture war” issues into the “family values” framing. And the election of Ronald Reagan, who relegitimized racism in his attacks on successful school busing plans.
In 1978, Republicans succeeded in electing a “moderate” pro-business Republican who went on to be governor of SC, elected in 1986. He was followed by a progressive Democrat, Liz Patterson, who served from 1987, until defeated in 1992 by Bob Inglis, who ran on a platform of term limits. (Inglis, by the way, kept his pledge of term limits, which is what allowed Jim DeMint the opening to run for Congress.) So from 1978 to 1992 (probably really 1994), the district was competitive both by party and ideologically. That got locked down during the Gingrich era as Speaker by the “red state-blue state” GOP framing of American politics and pollsters buying into the notion that PVI is destiny.
From the Goldwater defeat to two-party competitiveness in 14 years. A period of competitiveness of 14 years. And from progressive Liz Patterson to Tea Party Trey Gowdy in 22 years.
This year Trey Gowdy raised $698,000 and spent $502,000 against a candidate Deb Morrow who raised $4190 and spent $200. That is essentially a non-contested race, a race left totally on a sacrificial candidate and a few friends. The district broke roughly 62% Romney-35% Obama. There were over 100,000 votes for Obama. Cook’s PVI is R+15. That PVI is a creation of organizational and persuasive work by the GOP and a hermetically sealed media environment (there is no non-conservative broadcast media in the district). Social media deals with the media issue, as OFA demonstrated this year. Ground level organizing deals with GOTV and margins as OFA demonstrated again this year. Just not with downticket races. What it will take is candidate recruitment, making pickups a priority, and some external resources to provide some degree of media parity. And Democratic spokespeople willing to be aggressive about informing the public and shooting down the lies.
Your comments would be relevant to some extent post-Edwards, because the TX Democratic Party didn’t even bother to put up a candidate this year against Bill Flores, the Tea Partier that beat Edwards in 2010. This is typical of the TX Dem Party and I am not defending them for a minute. But the history of SC-04 sounds quite dfferent from TX-17.
To call this a “highly conservative district” is a form of victimism only if you want to see it that way. From an objective standpoint it is the simple truth. Edwards represented TX-17 for 20 years, during which it was known as the most Republican district in the US represented by a Democrat. Though popular, his survival was in doubt in every election.
College Station, TX is ground-zero Bush country, home of the George Bush Presidential Library on George Bush Boulevard. “W’s” Crawford ranch is also in TX CD 17.
Texas A&M University, founded by a group of former confederate officers to train an elite for “when the south shall rise again” — is a very conservative university, and the student body more so than the faculty. But Edwards was an Aggie himself — Aggie loyalty was one of the keys to his survival. Another is that CS’s twin city, Bryan, is Democratic, and a third is that, strange though it may seem, Nixon’s Southern Strategy did not completely succeed here until 2010 — Flores was the first Republican ever elected from the district.
As far as the New Deal, Blanton and Garrett, who represented the 17th during that time, seem to have been typical Dixiecrats.
After the 2008 redistricting CD17 centered more on the Waco area, home of Baylor, than on College Station. Yet Edwards survived three more elections.
Please read these two items:
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-politics/2010-general-election/chet-edwards-fights-for-his-cd-17-s
eat/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_17th_congressional_district
But will that poor family be able to afford $513 a year? That’s $10 a week. I could just skip coffee at work and save that, but it could be a disaster for a family with NO money to spare. It might mean buying three gallons of milk less a week.
I work among them – I think you vastly overestimate their level of information. They will bitch and moan about paying that $500 for Obamacare, because otherwise they would be paying NOTHING for health insurance because they wouldn’t have any. Fox Noise/talk radio is their only source of info, and you better believe those “news sources” will be attacking ACA for all they are worth, all the way down the line.
The Dems better get on the stick right now, and repeat this mantra from now till 2014. They are already behind the winger misinformation ball.