Obamacare is More Popular Than CNN Thinks

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From CNN:

A majority of Americans still oppose the nation’s new health care measure, three years after it became law, according to a new survey.

According to the poll, 43% of the public says it supports the health care law….Fifty-four percent of those questioned say they oppose the law, also relatively unchanged since 2010. The survey indicates that 35% oppose the health care law because it’s too liberal, with 16% saying they oppose the measure because it isn’t liberal enough.

Right. Let me rephrase this:

According to a recent poll, 59 percent of Americans support Obamacare, while 35 percent oppose it. Among supporters, 43 percent support the law as is, while 16 percent think it doesn’t go far enough.

The way CNN words the question in this poll, they almost have no choice but to say that 54 percent of the public opposes Obamacare. But that’s wildly misleading. If you oppose Obamacare solely because you think it should be more generous, then you’re not part of the group that’s commonly thought of as the opposition: tea partiers, conservatives, Republicans, and so forth. These are the folks who want to repeal Obamacare completely and leave it a smoking husk, and they’re the ones most of us think of as the “opposition.” If your main problem with Obamacare is that it’s not the NHS, you aren’t part of that group.

This has been a problem with Obamacare polls since the beginning. It’s also been a problem with CNN polls since the beginning. Why do they refuse to fix it and describe things more accurately?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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