Hating on “Obamacare,” Liking its Features

This has been a mystery to me for a long time, and here it comes up again: “Obamacare” polls poorly and yet the same people like the features of Obamacare.  The problem is pretty clearly that people don’t understand what “Obamacare” is; they’re responding to random stuff they’ve heard.  (Or, in some parts of the country, there’s apparently an element of personal hostility to our president.)

So what to do?  Republican politicians, of course, seize on the negative (false) impressions and rummage around in the lack of information, trolling for resentment.  Myself, I think we need to keep reminding people what’s in the law and of all the good it’s already doing.  You have to hope that eventually facts will win the argument.

So, here (again) is the chart from the above article that points out a bunch of the good – and popular – features that are part of “Obamacare”:

Oh, and let’s don’t forget that the number of uninsured folks has dropped to its lowest point in years, and medical inflation is falling, to the point where we probably need to adjust our deficit projections dramatically downward.

All that adds up to all kinds of good news, and people should know about it.

UPDATE, 8/28: I see that EJ Dionne had some comments on the same subject:

…
The most significant bit of election news last week was the decision of Sen. Mark Pryor, the embattled Arkansas Democrat, to run an ad touting his vote for the health care law as a positive for the people of his increasingly Republican state.
…
Democrats have never fully recovered from the Obama administration’s lousy sales job for (and botched rollout of) what is, legitimately, its proudest domestic achievement. That’s one reason Pryor doesn’t use the word “Obamacare” in describing what he voted for. Another is that, in many of the states with contested Senate races this year, most definitely including Arkansas, President Obama himself is so unpopular that if you attached his name to Social Security, one of the most popular programs in American history would probably drop 20 points in the polls.
…
As one Democratic pollster told me, his focus groups showed that when voters outside the Republican base are given details about what the law does and how it works, “people come around and say, ‘That’s not so bad, what’s everybody excited about?'”
…
Election results, like scripture, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. You can bet that foes of expanding health insurance coverage will try to interpret every Republican victory as a defeat for Obamacare. But as Mark Pryor knows, the president’s unpopularity in certain parts of the country doesn’t mean that voters want to throw his greatest accomplishment overboard — even if they’d be happy to rename it.