Obamacare-hating voters have been suckered by right-wing spin

By David Horsey, LA Times
5:00 AM PDT, October 3, 2013

Americans hate Obamacare but love the Affordable Care Act. That is the big story from one of America’s more reliable sources of information, Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmel, the comedian who hosts ABC’s late-night talk show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” posted a camera crew on a street in Hollywood and had them interview a random sample of Americans. The question put to these people was “Which do you support, Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act?”

Of those who ended up featured in an appallingly hilarious clip on Kimmel’s show, not a single one knew that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are one and the same thing. All but one of the interviewees expressed dislike for Obamacare and gave a variety of reasons for hating it -- it is socialist, it has holes in it, it forces everyone to buy into it, it is anti-American and, I’m not making this up -- it will lead to gun prohibition. They like the Affordable Care Act, however, because it is, well, affordable.

Kimmel’s stunt illustrates a problem at the core of the argument over healthcare and most other contentious issues in this country: Huge numbers of voters are simply ignorant. Either they simply do not pay attention to public affairs or they uncritically accept all the spin thrown at them by partisan politicians and pundits. This is what has given us the weird phenomenon of big majorities of Americans expressing support for the individual aspects of the Affordable Care Act, even as many of them insist they hate Obamacare.

(More here.)