Ignorance is bliss: How Americans' low political knowledge may help "Obamacare" work better

For those of you nervous about the success the health-care exchanges, take a look at this letter:

It's a boring HR letter. That's actually the point. 

(Photo by Patrick O'Mahen)

It comes from the benefits office of my most recent employer, the University of Michigan, with which I am still nominally affiliated. The letter describes coming options under the Affordable Care Act. It indicates that UM offers many employees health care benefits that meet standards for the ACA, and indicates that other employees can go get health insurance on the exchanges.

Polls suggest that Americans don’t particularly love the ACA. Most polls also suggest that they don’t understand it. With uncertain roll-out and the loud and well-funded campaign encouraging people not to sign up on the exchanges, many of the law’s backers (including me) are a bit nervous. But it’s reassuring that a letter like this that will be many Americans’ first contact with the health care law. 

Follow me below the fold for my reasoning.

Will the ACA's medical device tax be repealed?

Today I explore a different aspect of yesterday's topic of the Affordable Care Act's Medical Device Tax. It's more political science (the factors that influence public policy making) than public policy (how effective actual policy ideas are).

The original perspectives piece on the tax in the New England Journal of Medicine by Daniel Kramer and Aaron Kesselheim report that the U.S. Senate voted 79-20 to repeal the tax as part of its non-binding budget resolution that passed last March. The authors then note that the repeal vote was bipartisan, overwhelming, and came after an intense lobbying campaign by the medical device industry. Based on this vote, they suggest that the tax is in imminent danger of repeal.

I think this fear of repeal likely overblown for now because talk is cheap and there were too many possible factors that into each Senator's vote to repeal to figure out if a majority of Senators would have actually voted to repeal the tax if push came to shove (the fancy social science term is to say the result was overdetermined)

Chait on the GOP's desperate push to kill Obamacare

Here's a fascinating must-read on the implementation of Obamacare regarding the differences of rhetoric between the pro- and anti- Affordable Care Act factions. It's a wonderfully researched summary full of very interesting political science hypotheses waiting to be tested.

Jonathan Chait was one of the earliest, best and most thorough reporters on the ACA as it wheezed toward passage. It's only fitting that he's here writing excellent stuff at the end of the journey.

Update: Krugman nails it:

Yep, when it comes to reaching hipsters, or young people in general — I know, Katy Perry — Dems have big advantages; all that coastal cultural elite hatred suddenly turns into a big disadvantage for the right.

But that’s not all: there are also channels of influence the party of Fox News simply cannot reach: Spanish-language radio and TV, black churches (which played a big role in 2012), and more.

I don’t know whether anyone thought this out in advance, but the battle of the exchanges is indeed being fought on remarkably favorable ground for the reformers. And I, for one, find the thought of conservatives humiliated by an army of tweeting hipsters remarkably cheering.

In which I climb into the Monkey Cage

So I write things for other places too. I suppose it makes sense to link to this piece in the Monkey Cage, which highlights some of the work in my dissertation about the relevance of public broadcasting for increasing political knowledge. Despite our best efforts as political scientists, political science actually remains a relevant discipline for making public policy from time to time.

Now if some one would tell Tom Coburn. Actually don't -- the problem is that he understands all too well that political science has found  some uncomfortable truths about how modern democracy works -- or might not work -- in the United States.