January 26, 2017

Obamacare Is Slightly More Popular Than It Used To Be

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We’ve seen a bunch of recent polling that shows an uptick in support for Obamacare now that the prospect of gutting it has become more real. However, as with any polling, you can get a better picture of what things really look like if you aggregate all the polls. Here is Pollster’s aggregate for Obamacare approval:

There has been an upward trend over the past six months of about five points or so. The rise since Donald Trump’s election has been a little less than two points. Technically, then, Obamacare is “more popular than ever,” but not by a lot.

Hopefully this trend will continue, but for now it’s not something to hang our hats on. We’re far better off hammering Republicans on specific features of Obamacare that truly have very high support: the pre-existing conditions ban, the cap on out-of-pocket payments, the tax credits, the Medicaid expansion, etc. That’s most likely where the battle will be won or lost.

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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.

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