Americans Don't Want Government to Guarantee Healthcare, Again, Economist Jonathan Gruber set off a new debate over healthcare this week with his, let’s say, indelicate comments about Obamacare’s passage relying on the “stupidity of the American voter.” Gruber, who helped craft the law, said certain provisions of the law had to be written for optics rather than logic—so, for example, instead of simply writing checks to the poor or sick, it regulates insurance companies to make them charge higher rates to healthier people so that they can offer lower rates to sicker people.
What the writers of the Affordable Care Act didn’t need to mask was the underlying goal of the law: to ensure that every American would have healthcare coverage. Even if the methods were byzantine or unpopular, President Obama had campaigned on the healthcare-for-all message, and it had been broadly popular for the previous decade.
Since he took up reform, it hasn’t been.
A Gallup poll has found that for a third consecutive year, a majority of Americans (52 percent) agree that it is not the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage. That opposition is in stark reversal of opinions before before 2009: Going back to 2000, the first year the question was asked, a majority consistently took the opposite view, with 69 percent supporting the government’s role as recently as 2007. In between, opinions have fluctuated but stayed roughly balanced.
