Health Care Polls: February 2021

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Lessons from 2009-2010 ACA Public Opinion for Biden's 2021 Agenda

Noting the similarities between 2009 and 2021 -- a new Democratic president taking office with an ambitious policy agenda and his party holding majorities in the House and Senate -- Dan Hopkins examines what lessons President Biden and the Democrats might learn for this year's policy debates (e.g., new COVID-19 economic-relief legislation) from the public's reaction to President Obama's rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2009-2010. Hopkins focuses on a few major themes, such as how, when a bill has numerous provisions (as the ACA did), the public will likely focus on controversial and unpopular facets of the legislation, rather than its popular parts.

Thursday, February 4, 2021

Status of Obamacare as Biden Replaces Trump

This Vox article from the eve of President Biden's inauguration provides a good overview of where things stand at the moment with the 2010 Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). The obvious news is that the law survived the Trump presidency largely intact, but there remain some court cases on aspects of it.

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."