Health Care BS

A lot of people, including some conservatives who should know better, have fallen for the latest health reform meme—-that the electorate is finally coming around on Obamacare. As evidence for this BS, a lot of left-leaning bloggers and journalists are pointing to the following chart from Pollster.com:

However, Jeffery Anderson at the Weekly Standard shows that our progressive friends are merely whistling past the graveyard. He provides a pretty convincing argument to the effect that this chart is misleading and does not, in fact, show any increase in voter support for Obamacare at all:

[The chart] doesn’t indicate that Obamacare is becoming more popular. It merely indicates that the mixture of polls has changed.

First, there are way fewer polls:

The number of polls has dwindled substantially — from 22 in the month before Obamacare’s passage and 19 in the month afterward, to just 4 in the past month.

And it doesn’t include polls of actual voters:

[Pollster.com] hasn’t included a poll of likely voters in the past two months (compared to 7 in the month before passage).

And why does this matter?

This is important because Obamacare has consistently polled far better among Americans as a whole than among Americans who vote.

In other words, the people who will actually show up at the polling booth in November, and decide the outcome of the midterm elections, are dramatically under-represented in the chart. The one poll that surveys only likely voters, Rasmussen, is no longer included in the Pollster.com mixture.

So, don’t buy the “increasing support” meme. It’s BS. As Anderson puts it, voter opposition to Obamacare is “rock-solid.”