According to a new poll, a shockingly low percentage of Americans claim to have benefited from President Barack Obama’s signature piece of domestic legislation, Obamacare. In what ought to be viewed as a tremendous blow for Obamacare’s economic architects, only 14% of those polled said that Obamacare lowered their premiums, and only 13% of Americans said that Obamacare improved their co-pay fees.
The Hill reports:
Few Americans believe their health care situation has been improved by key components of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), according to a Hill-HarrisX poll released Thursday.
Across party lines, most registered voters contacted for the March 30-31 survey said major provisions of former President Obama’s signature health care law either had no real impact on them or had made things worse.
Forty-eight percent of respondents said the ACA had not impacted their monthly insurance premium costs, while 46 percent said their premiums were worse compared to before the law. Just 14 percent of respondents said they were better off.
When asked about the health care reform’s effect on co-pay fees, 41 percent said they were worse off, and 35 percent said they were not impacted. Only 13 percent said the ACA improved those costs.
Forty-one percent said their access to medical service providers is the same as it was before the ACA, while 16 percent said it is better. Thirty-four percent said things are worse in terms of access.
Perhaps surprisingly, even Democrats polled were rather downtrodden about Obamacare’s effects. According to The Hill, “Democrats were more likely to say they had not benefited from the ACA than to say the law has helped their personal situations.” Perhaps many Democrats, especially on the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hard Left, will interpret this as a cue to double down on “Medicare-for-all.” But no sane Democrat ought to interpret this as an endorsement of the (possibly even designed to fail) prevailing status quo. And “Medicare-for-all,” of course, has no shortage of its own problems. As Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro wrote last November:
So, would “Medicare-for-all” — Ocasio-Cortez’s preferred solution — actually take care of the [healthcare cost] problem? Or would it exacerbate it, given that nationalized health care creates more rationing, not less? There’s a reason nationalized health care systems like Sweden’s and Britain’s have necessitated increased private spending outside of the rationed systems. As Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution points out: “Sweden has increased its spending on private care for the elderly by 50 percent in the past decade, abolished its government’s monopoly over pharmacies, and made other reforms. Last year alone, the British government spent more than $1 billion on care from private and other non-NHS providers.”
And the entire global medical industry benefits from America’s private health care spending, which drives the creation of new drugs. So what happens when America no longer covers the cost for such pharmaceuticals? Our Food and Drug Administration may be slow, but it’s a lot faster than its European equivalents, which is why the vast majority of new cancer drugs are developed and made available faster in the United States.
As TheBlaze notes, differences in those polled broke down, to some extent, along socioeconomic lines: “The less economically fortunate were much more unsure of the benefits of Obamacare, with 21 percent saying so, while the most fortunate were far less unsure — only 6 percent said they didn’t know if they benefitted or not. But among all four economic classes, a plurality said that their condition had not changed because of Obamacare.”