I find this trend strange and disturbing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/opinion/has-obamacare-turned-voters-against-sharing-the-wealth.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region
Four decades of Cold War "Bootstraps!" mentality have convinced people to blame themselves for being poor. I feel Americans need to live outside the country and experience other cultures. I think they will be surprised at what they find. Too many Americans rarely venture outside the bubble that is USA.
With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, the share of Americans convinced that health care is a right shrank from a majority to a minority.
This shift in public opinion is a major victory for the Republican Party. It is part of a larger trend: a steady decline in support for redistributive government policies. Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at Berkeley and one of the nations premier experts on inequality, is a co-author of a study that confirms this trend, which has been developing over the last four decades. A separate study, The Structure of Inequality and Americans Attitudes Toward Redistribution, found that as inequality increases, so does ideological conservatism in the electorate.
The erosion of the belief in health care as a government-protected right is perhaps the most dramatic reflection of these trends. In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed by Gallup said that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States. By late 2014, however, Gallup found that this percentage had fallen 24 points to 45 percent, while the percentage of respondents who said health care is not a federal responsibility nearly doubled to 52 percent.
Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvards School of Public Health, wrote in an email that the character of the debate over health care began to change during the 2008 campaign. Before that, according to Blendon, the major issue was the moral principle of providing care for the poor. In the context of the presidential campaign, however, the public focus shifted:
Critics started raising concerns about the cost of these plans higher taxes and premiums for those with coverage, more government interference in physician choices, and of course the potential of abortion coverage. People with coverage [83.7 percent of the population in 2010] became concerned about the implications for middle income people with these universal plans.
The altered public mood is especially relevant because the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling later this year in King v. Burwell, a case that challenges the legality of the Affordable Care Act.
If the court rules against the A.C.A., public and private health care delivery would be disrupted, to put it mildly. Congressional Republicans are already working on replacement proposals that would, among other things, limit coverage for the poor.
The liberal Urban Institute has analyzed the potential consequences of a court ruling against the Affordable Care Act: the number of uninsured people in the 34 states that have chosen not to open their own exchanges would, according to the institute, increase by 8.2 million; $28.8 billion in tax credits and other benefits would be eliminated for 9.3 million people in 2016 alone; and the number of people obtaining insurance through the private non-group markets in these states would fall by 69 percent, from 14.2 million to 4.5 million, as a relatively healthy, younger population loses federal subsidies and drops insurance coverage.
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With the loss of healthier customers, insurance companies would be forced to raise premiums for their remaining clientele by 35 percent, from an annual average of $4,130 to $5,590, according to the institutes study.
As Republicans put together legislative alternatives to address the health care crisis that could result from a Supreme Court ruling against Obamacare, they are looking to public opinion surveys to determine the range of options that would have public support.
Some of those options both those supported by the public, and those that are off limits are reflected in responses to a December 2014 Kaiser Family Foundation poll, one of the most recent surveys asking for opinions on specific provisions of the A.C.A.
The Kaiser survey found strong opposition, 64-35, to the individual mandate requiring that everyone purchase health coverage. In contrast, a majority of respondents, 60-38, supported the employer mandate that requires companies with 100 or more workers to provide health insurance.
An earlier New York Times poll, conducted in December 2013, found that 52 percent of those surveyed believed that the Affordable Care Act would increase their medical costs; 14 percent said it would reduce costs. Thirty-six percent believed that Obamacare would worsen the quality of health care compared to 17 percent who thought it would improve it.
On the plus side for the Affordable Care Act, those surveyed by the Times decisively supported, 86-10, the requirement that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions; the requirement to cover children in parents plans up to age 26 was supported 70-28; and 76 percent supported providing some help to poor workers who do not have employer-based coverage.
Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, answering my email, wrote that the tax credits in the Republican plans tend to be quite a bit less generous than under Obamacare, and that low-income people, in particular, were likely to end up with very skimpy insurance and fewer low-income people would be covered under the program.
The conservative shift in public attitudes on health care and on issues of redistribution and inequality pose a significant threat to the larger liberal agenda.
The 2013 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly that I mentioned at the beginning of this article, The Structure of Inequality and Americans Attitudes Toward Redistribution, suggests that Democratic programs providing tax-financed benefits to the poor are facing growing hostility.
The author of the paper, Matthew Luttig, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, found that while numerous political theorists suggest that rising inequality and the shift in the distribution of income to those at the top should lead to increasing support for liberal policies, in practice, rising inequality in the United States has largely promoted ideological conservatism.
Luttig compares public attitudes with inequality trends and reports that his data show that:
Both the absolute level and the changing structure of inequality have largely been a force promoting conservatism, not increasing support for redistribution as theoretically expected.
I asked two experts, Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, and Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, if Luttigs conclusions are consistent with their own research, and both said he is on target. Luttigs conclusions run counter to the view of liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is calling on her fellow Democrats to make tackling inequality a top priority. Heather McGhee, for example, the president of Demos (motto: an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy), argues that inequality should be the defining issue of the American political debate this campaign cycle.
Insofar as Luttig is right, his findings pose a serious dilemma for Democrats and for their likely nominee, Hillary Clinton. A party that claims to pursue policies benefiting those on the bottom half of the income ladder inevitably faces questions about the issue of redistribution.
Divisions within the Democratic Party run deep and are not limited to health care. There are splits on matters as diverse as the carried interest tax break, a capital-gains tax break which is a bottom line matter for major Wall Street Democratic donors, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, a test of strength between multinational corporations who favor it, and organized labor, which is opposed.
In her announcement video on April 12, Clinton chose to emphasize cultural themes of family, same-sex marriage, education and womens rights taking the spotlight off income inequality. She avoided the issue of explicitly redistributive goals and focused instead on roadblocks facing workers trying to climb the ladder.
But this kind of evasiveness cant last. Neither core Democratic constituencies on the left nor Republicans on the right will permit Clinton to remain guarded on these divisive issues. If conservative beliefs are strengthening in direct proportion to increasing inequality, however, Democrats are caught in a policy bind that has no short-term solution.
The General Social Survey shows there has been a slight decrease in stated support for redistribution in the US since the 1970s, even among those who self-identify as having below-average income, according to Saez and his three co-authors, Ilyana Kuziemko, a professor at Columbia Business School, Michael I. Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Stefanie Stantcheva, a junior fellow at Harvard.
Even worse for Democrats, the Saez paper found that information about inequality also makes respondents trust government less, decreasing by nearly twenty percent the share of respondents who trust government most of the time:
Hence, emphasizing the severity of a social or economic problem appears to undercut respondents willingness to trust the government to fix it the existence of the problem could act as evidence of the governments limited capacity to improve outcomes.
The findings of the Saez group are consistent with Luttigs. Taken together, they suggest that even if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate in 2016, largely on the basis of favorable demographic trends, the party will confront serious hurdles if it attempts to deliver material support to working men and women and the very poor. Redistribution is in trouble, and that is likely to tie American politics in knots for many years to come.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/opinion/has-obamacare-turned-voters-against-sharing-the-wealth.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region
Four decades of Cold War "Bootstraps!" mentality have convinced people to blame themselves for being poor. I feel Americans need to live outside the country and experience other cultures. I think they will be surprised at what they find. Too many Americans rarely venture outside the bubble that is USA.
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closest thing to a European city you can find in north America.
