Obamacare, you may have heard,
is working just fine. “It turns out it’s working pretty well
in the real world,” President Obama
said of the health law in a speech at a fundraiser
last week.
If so, the public hasn’t caught on yet. A new poll from
the Associated Press finds that just 31 percent of the public
approve of the way the president is handling health care.
Obama’s fellow Democrats aren’t exactly enthusiastic either.
Just 36 percent of Democrats campaigning for Congress this year
have explicitly supported the health care law, according to
research by a pair of scholars at the Brookings Institution. This
is the party that passed the law and is home to virtually all its
political support—and yet a majority won’t fully stand by the law
in public.
Why not? Perhaps because the evidence for its success is so
underwhelming. It’s true that the worst-case scenarios that seemed
plausible last year, when the exchange system crashed, failed to
occur, and also the law has posted some successes in recent weeks:
low premium growth, 7.3 million paid enrollments, an increase in
insurer participation in the exchanges.
But the law has also continued to generate a steady stream of
bad news—more glitches, more failures, more misfires, more unhappy
providers and customers, with more challenges on the way as the
second open enrollment period begins. And even the success stories
are not quite as positive as the headlines make them out to be.
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