Health Care Polls: September 2017

Friday, September 29, 2017

Ezra Klein's "Why Obamacare Survived" Cites Public-Opinion Surveys

With Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act stymied once again (for the short term, at least), Ezra Klein analyzes "Why Obamacare Survived" at Vox. The article cites and links to public-opinion surveys on consumers' satisfaction with the different types of health-care coverage they receive, and also provides several statistics on the costs of the ACA. All in all, Klein's article is a handy one to have, for analyzing health-insurance policy.

R2K Polling Controversy

On June 29, 2010, the website Daily Kos announced that polls it had commissioned from the firm Research 2000 were "likely bunk." Kos has asked readers to disregard all R2K polls done for his site. Any Kos/R2K polls cited here on the Health Care Polls blog over the past several months should accordingly be disregarded, as well. I am leaving them up, however, as part of the historical record. Often, my analyses of polling trends that included R2K surveys also included polls from other firms, too. I hope the pending lawsuits between Kos and R2K will reveal whether the latter's polls are completely valid, completely made-up, or perhaps, as Nate Silver suggested, the product of data being merely "mangled."