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The Struggle to Sell Obamacare

Over at Reason Online, Peter Suderman has a chart showing how President Obama’s health-care-reform law remains pretty unpopular one year after its enactment.

Suderman offers several reasons why the bill has failed to become popular. Among other things, he points to this “Fact Checker” column in today’s Washington Post, which looks at claims made by Democratic lawmakers about the law that are either not exactly true or totally untrue. Here is one:

Here, Pelosi is repeating a talking point from the health-care debate. The 4 million figure comes from a report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning group, which estimated that universal health care would add 250,000 to 400,000 jobs a year. Pelosi took the top end of the range and then multiplied it by 10, a numerical sleight-of-hand that Polifact last year labeled “half true.”

A Pelosi spokesman noted she has been using this statistic for 14 months now, but we frown on the reuse of statistics previously found to be suspect.

In this case, since the bill has passed, the Congressional Budget Office has done its own analysis (the one McConnell cited) that cast some doubt on the CAP analysis, written before the bill was passed into law. Presumably, members of Congress should pay more attention to estimates by their own budget agency than think tanks that promote their agenda. Repeating this dubious statistic is worth at least a Pinocchio or two.

Read about the other bogus claims — like that the law will boost insurance coverage among small employers, or that it will reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars — here.

New on The Corner. . .


COMMENTS   2

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hayaka
   03/21/11 15:59

I don't understand why these polls always ask the question as if (1) being in favor or (2) in opposition to the Health Care Act, are the only two reasonable responses. It's not particularly probative when the "not in favor" group includes both the people who oppose Obamacare in concept, and those who favor it in concept but doesn't think it goes far enough. Those two groups have opinions that are diametrically opposed, but are nonetheless grouped together as opposing the bill.

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   03/21/11 16:54

The usual thing with polls, hayaka. For example, they always counted opposition to Bush as a sign that the whole country was lurching Left when, in fact, a lot of the crabbiness with him (especially toward the end) was people to the Right of Bush desperately wanting him to be more conservative.

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