Did Obamacare Cost Clinton the Presidency? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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it would confirm the fears of Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman, who wrote in a July 2016 column in The Wall Street Journal that poor reporting about pre-discount premium increases led people to believe that their own out-of-pocket costs were increasing. “People may read news stories on premium increases as validating criticisms they have heard about the ACA,” Altman wrote. Eighty percent of the people in that month’s Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll had seen reports on premium increases, and over two-thirds of those falsely believed that the increases applied to all plans or just to employer-based coverage. Poll respondents also consistently overestimated premium spikes, mistaking the highs reported for average increases, which in major cities hovered around 10 percent.
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The second piece of Kogan and Wood’s argument is that premium increases would likely have been smaller without what they term Republican “sabotage,” and that the sabotage also affected the election independent of information gaps.
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A campaign by Republican legislators to block market-stabilizing provisions and payments to insurers, block all legislation designed to tweak the health-care law, and promise a full repeal of the bill in 2016 almost certainly contributed to market instability in the exchanges and rising premiums.
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Additionally, Republican governors have mostly been slow to expand Medicaid coverage to low-income residents of their states or have declined to do so at all, decisions that have both decreased the number of potentially satisfied Clinton voters with new coverage and further destabilized markets and prices. The study finds that had Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin embraced Medicaid expansion or even pursued slightly less-obstructionist policies, it could very well have tipped those states—and the 2016 election—to Clinton.
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it does suggest a link between health care and voting that experts have long observed. A series of election studies by Harvard researcher Robert Blendon illustrates that while health care isn’t always a major factor in elections, in the cycles when it does rise to be a top priority for many voters, dissatisfaction with costs is the main driver of their decisions. Notably, it doesn’t really matter if voters’ personal costs have really increased; what matters is that they believe prices are rising.