The Kaiser Family Foundation, the entity that runs the Kaiser Health Tracking poll, has long been a prominent cheerleader for Obamacare. As a result, the Kaiser Health Tracking poll questions are always horribly biased towards the Left, and the "gotcha" question included in this month's poll is no different.
Kaiser asked respondents: "As far as you know, did people who got new health insurance under the health care law (have a choice between private health plans) or did they (enroll in a single government health plan)?"
The correct answer, according to Kaiser, is that "people who got new health insurance under the health care law" had a "a choice between private health plans." Kaiser writes up the results:
Previous tracking polls have found that misperceptions about the ACA are common among the public, and more than four years after the law’s passage this continues to be the case. The July poll finds that fewer than four in ten Americans (37 percent) are aware that people who got new health insurance under the ACA had a choice between private health plans, while about a quarter (26 percent) think the newly insured were enrolled in a single government plan and about four in ten (38 percent) say they don’t know enough to answer the question.
The survey also finds differences in perceptions on this question by political party identification and other demographic characteristics. For example, Republicans (34 percent) are less likely than Democrats (43 percent) to say that enrollees had a choice of private health plans. Other groups that are less likely to be aware of this fact include those with an unfavorable view of the law (32 percent), self-described conservatives (31 percent), people ages 65 and older (29 percent), and the uninsured (29 percent).
Unfortunately the liberal activists who run Kaiser's poll have their facts wrong.
Yes, millions of wealthier Americans who gained coverage through Obamacare did have a choice of heavily regulated "private" plans. But millions of lower-income Americans who were also forced to buy health insurance did not qualify for private insurance under Obamacare. They were all enrolled in "a single government health plan" (aka Medicaid).
In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, more than half of all people who were supposed to gain health insurance in 2014 (14 million) were projected to do it through Medicaid (8 million).
And according to a Rand Corp. analysis of those that did actually gain insurance through Obamacare (9.5 million), almost half of them (4.5 million) did so through Medicaid.
So the Republicans queried by Kaiser are right and Kaiser is dead wrong: for many, if not most, of those who gained health insurance through Obamacare, they had no choice but "a single government plan."
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