Majority misunderstands Obamacare

According to Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick, PhD, and colleagues at GfK, the Associated Press and elsewhere, people’s understanding and view of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would improve if education efforts were to correct public misunderstanding of the law:

Survey participants had been asked, among other things, 18 questions about whether a certain provision was in the bill passed by Congress, and while often-large majorities gave correct answers regarding many provisions, 0 percent answered all questions correctly.  

“No Americans correctly understood what is and is not in the ACA,” Krosnick said. “Many people did not know that [certain] elements of the bill are included in it. And many people believed that the bill included elements (e.g. so-called “death panels”) that are not actually in the ACA.”  

The researchers probed further to find that the majority of participants favored most of the elements of the health law that the researchers looked at; in fact, only three plan elements were not favored by the majority. The majority of participants also opposed policies that were sometimes erroneously thought to be part of the law – fewer than 20 percent, for example, supported “death panels.” In addition, the results show that the more accurate a person’s beliefs were about the 18 elements that the researchers asked about, the more he or she liked the law.  

“We can infer that if people were to learn fully what the ACA includes, public approval of the bill would increase,” said Krosnick.

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