The way to solve the public’s revulsion at taxes is to spend their tax dollars wisely. Not to lie about them.
What lie about taxes was specifically made? The mandate was there, it was just not called a tax.
Is that a lie, like the Iraq War paying for itself? Or tax cuts increasing prosperity? Or the various lies about the estate tax?
Calling a tax something else because the word tax is toxic, is a pretty weak thing to get upset about, when the other guys literally said, over the space of years, that the ACA was going to cause the murder of the elderly.
As if Democrats have never used visions of elderly people being pushed over a cliff as a political attack. On the very SAME issue!
There’s nothing wrong with messaging. The problem comes when the other side counter-messages “It’s a tax!” and you accuse them of being liars.
I think liberals have a point when they say that ACA’s individual parts are popular, at least the benefits. THe biggest problem ACA has is a credibility gap. The Democrats can whine about whatever lies Republicans told to oppose the law all they want, but being on the losing side, the Republican lies didn’t actually affect people. The Democratic lies did.
Democrats, or one single third party group? Never mind that turning Medicare into a voucher system would literally cause deaths by edging out marginal cases from the health care market.
It’s not remotely the same. One single commercial funded by a third party group, vs. a concerted effort by GOP talking heads.
Seriously, bro.
If it was manipulated so that it didn’t count as a tax, you’d be on better ground. The tax/mandate thing is akin to the Catholic church deciding that Otters don’t count as meat, nom nom.
The Republican lies still affect the perception of the law to this day.
I’m referring to the Gingrich Congress’ efforts to slow Medicare cost growth, which did not involve vouchers. It was pretty much exactly what Democrats are doing now to pay for ACA. I guess Democrats just didn’t want Medicare waste to be solved until they could use it to pay for another program. Very cynical.
Again, it would be as you describe if the Democrats hadn’t responded to Republican counter-arguments that it was indeed a tax with “Those guys are liars”.
As do the Democratic lies. As a law is implemented, the reality starts to overtake the rhetoric. The problem for the law is that the reality didn’t only overtake Republican lies to defeat it, it also overtook Democratic lies to sell it, and arguably those lies were more publicized. “Death panels” was a cute little story that Democrats seized on to discredit ACA opponents, but “If you like your insurance and doctor you can keep them” came directly from the President’s mouth and every major Democratic politician. And there’s your credibility gap.
What a shocker, this thread devolved into another ACA-related retread discussion. Ok, so here is what I have to contribute to this, anyway.
There are a myriad of reasons why the ACA is broadly unpopular amongst the general public, a number of which I’ve already touched on - at various points - in my other thread. Since this is the direction in which this topic is heading, then let’s have at it.
First and foremost, the ACA’s entrenched unpopularity stretches all the way back to its protracted drafting and eventual passage. In spite of the conservative rallying cry behind Gruber’s latest gaffe about the law’s supposed lack of legislative “transparency,” no amount of GOP historical revisionism will change the fact that the ACA’s long development in Congress was one of the most transparent legislative ordeals in Congressional history. Mind you, the law was debated in Congress for a year and a half before Obama finally signed it, and during that time there was round-the-clock reporting, Congressional interviews, and rampant punditry and analyses about the how eventual law was going to function. Don’t forget, one of the most controversial parts of the ACA - the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback” - was jettisoned entirely from the final law precisely because the ceaseless transparency made it resolutely untenable to voters.
Now, yes, here’s where I get to lay into the GOP for their horsefuckery. A year and a half in Congress gave rise to all the lies that even adaher has admitted the GOP has been guilty of perpetuating: shit like “death panels,” “socialized medicine,” a “government-takeover of health care,” the “end of freedom as we know it,” etc. Those lies are still unsubstantiated yet are still being told by GOP politicians, and they got their start during the lengthy push to get the ACA passed in the first place.
The second big issue is, sadly, an inherent one within the Democratic Party; namely, aside from a few firebrands like Sanders, Grayson, & Liz Warren, the Democrats in Congress are by and large total cowards. After they passed the law, they all virtually decided to run away from it in the face of constant GOP lies & attacks. There was a refusal to defend the ACA, a reluctance to even talk about it, and a White House that was doing jack shit to sell its landmark achievement.
Still, that ubiquitous reticence was exacerbated by the implementation timeline of the coverage expansion. Here, too, is another thing made painfully clear by Gruber’s latest admission: the Democrats resorted to a fair amount of gimmickry in order to hit their ACA budget targets. In practical terms, this meant that the biggest coverage expansions didn’t begin until last January - nearly four years after Obama signed the law - when, really, the administration could’ve gotten the bulk of the law up and running in two.
Still, though, even now that the law is objectively working & objectively doing precisely what it was DESIGNED to do - dramatically increase access to health insurance - why does it continue to enjoy stagnant public approval? It’s all in the timeline.
Think about it, four years is a long damn time for shit to happen in the political world. Between March 2010 when Obama signed the ACA and January 2014 when it (mostly) came online, a ton of shit was allowed to happen. In practical terms, there were two national elections (in 2010 & 2012), a Tea Party insurgency, a Supreme Court decision, and a fuckin’ government SHUTDOWN, all of which were heavily influenced by predominantly negative ACA politicking. In a more general sense, however, the four year gap gave rise to a certifiable industry that fueled ubiquitous anti-ACA rhetoric & demagoguery. Sky-is-falling predictions about the law’s effects were rampant, public opinion naturally soured, and anybody on the opposing side was either drowned out or too cowardly to speak up.
And that’s a point that I really want to drive home here: Conservatives can’t keep crowing about the ACA’s continued unpopularity without also acknowledging the ubiquity of anti-ACA demagoguery over the past four years. Of course, it follows that if the message is that “the ACA is the root of all evil” and that that message is repeated ad nauseum for several years, then the general public (who has never been widely aware of the ACA because the administration hasn’t sold it) will naturally develop an aversion towards the program.
Finally, yes, the rollout of HealthCare.Gov was botched & the “keep your plan” promise turned out to not be entirely accurate. Even the latter fiasco, however, was significantly overblown by the media & their GOP darlings; yes, some folks did have to update their plans as a consequence of new ACA regulations, but at the same time, the “keep your plan” promise DID turn out to be broadly true for MOST people even if it wasn’t true for everybody. The thing is, after Obama got caught up in that mess, he proactively decided to STOP making that promise, whereas the GOP continues to spew its horse shit about “death panels” and “socialized medicine.”
Even now that HealthCare.Gov is essentially fixed, the impact of its lousy rollout still impacts most of the public, many of whom don’t even realize the objective success of the ACA because (a) the conservative media won’t tell them & (b) the rest of the media doesn’t care. It’s unfortunate, but that’s where we are.
Now that SCOTUS is going to put the ACA through another existential crisis, the latest conservative gambit is to rally behind Gruber’s most recent gaffe in order to somehow mandate that the entire law is illegitimate in the first place, even though, y’know, it was publicly debated for a year and a half, passed by both chambers of Congress, signed by a democratically elected (and reelected!) president, and upheld by a Republican Supreme Court in 2012. But all of that doesn’t matter because Jon Gruber said some stupid things several years ago. :smack:
It’s important to remember, however, that even though the ACA is broadly unpopular amongst the public, repealing it is even more unpopular. And, as has already been said ITT, the public actually SUPPORTS the things that ACA does when those things are, y’know, actually described to them.
Good post. I take issue with your last assertion though. Pollsters used to ask about repeal and the public tended to prefer repeal when the choices were presented as “repeal or keep as-is”. Pollsters stopped asking that question for some reason.
What we do know is that the public does demand that the law be fixed rather than repealed if that’s at all possible. The question is whether the fixes they demand would undermine the law to the point where it is effectively repealed. The GOP can actually destroy the law simply by giving the public what they might want: repeal of the individual mandate, for starters.
But to yank this thread back to the original subject, this is another example of how there’s been no shortage of messaging from the administration. IT’s not like the administration just quietly tried to make a good health care law and didn’t sell their efforts to the public. They did. It’s just that the public doesn’t believe them.
When you’re losing the argument, just assuming that you’re losing because the other side is lying is childish. Contra Gruber, the public is not idiotic. If they believe one side over the other over a long period of time, they usually have a good reason. One thing that the administration can do better is to stop lying all the time, stop being so obsessed with spin. Obama ran in part to change that about Washington. Biden has always been one to level with the public. Is anyone in the administration listening to him?
Ron Fournier, hardly a right-wing zealot, talks about the consequences of the lies used to sell ACA:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/obamacare-s-foundation-of-lies-20141112
[QUOTE=Ron Fournier]
but the administration’s dishonest approach to health care reform has helped make Obamacare unpopular while undermining the public’s faith in an activist government.
[/QUOTE]
Ron Fournier severely underestimates the cynicism of the American public. Not that I’m not angry, as a liberal – but any supposed “dishonest approach to health care reform” has only been a small part of the somewhat weak popularity of the ACA, in my view; far more important has been the all-or-nothing attacks by the Republicans on the bill, and the reluctance of many Democrats to defend it, despite the continuing good news on the actual data and statistics of health care in the country as a result of the bill. So it is largely the Democrats’ fault that the bill is not as popular as it should be, but it’s not because they lied, it’s because they were too weak and afraid to defend it.
The good news about the ACA should be in every Democrat’s stump speech, and should be weaved into every political ad, and every press conference.
I find that argument… persuasive. True, if only one side gets to make their case, while the other side acts afraid, then most people will believe the side that stated their case.
I haven’t abandoned the thread, but this (along with attacks by those parsing what I wrote) is why I’ve stopped engaging in the discussion. Have fun rehashing the same old shit, folks.
“Seizing victory” is a more energizing rallying cry than “staving off defeat.”
On what planet did that occur?
I hope someone can explain the outrage over the “Lie” because I’m at a loss to understand it.
The terms of ACA were absolutely explicit. As 2ManyTacos pointed out, it was completely transparent who would have to put what to whom, when, where and why. The outrage, the claim that Obama lied, is based *solely *on the use of the term “tax,” which was endorsed by John Roberts Chief of SCOTUS. Correct?
In what mind-set would the word itself make a difference, when all else was transparent? The who, what, when, where, and why were already known, but “Americans” are outraged to learn their insurance premiums are a “tax.” Can anyone help me, or anyone not a “right-wing zealot,” to understand this?
[QUOTE=Juliet Capulet, quoted by Wm Shakespeare]
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet…
[/QUOTE]
The insects in Family Mutillidae are considered wasps. Am I lying not to mention that their common name is “velvet ants”?
The planet in which many millions more have health care that didn’t before, and the uninsured rate is the lowest it’s been in decades (if not ever). This one.
Was he? Or was he just an alternative to Bush? I bet the Democrats could have run a little yellow dog for President in 2008 and won against the party that invaded Iraq and let the economy collapse.