Yesterday, Nyceve published a diary asking Is the Affordable Care Act helping you--at all?. Some 481 comments later, I thought it might be interesting (in my geeky kind of way) to analyze the responses.
I went through every comment and assigned it to a category:
Responses |
Percent |
Category |
322 |
67% |
not explicitly relevant |
71 |
15% |
an explicit 'no' or 'not yet' |
88 |
18% |
some kind of affirmative |
(It should go without saying that nyceve's diary comments
do not represent a scientific survey -- but I'll say it anyway -- nor does my analysis represent anything deep, just a quick, somewhat arbitrary assignment of comments to categories)
Taking into consideration only the clearly affirmative or negative responses, we see that:
-- 55% were affirmative.
-- 45% were negative.
I further assigned the affirmative responses to various sub-categories depending on what was said. If the comment mentioned individually more than one person I counted each person being aided as something to tally. If the comment mentioned specifically more than one favorable aspect of the ACA, I tallied each. (So there were an additional 10 affirmative tallies beyond 88 because of this multiple assignment, to 98).
Responses |
Percent |
Affirmative Sub-Category |
|
54 |
55% |
adult child able to be on parents' plan |
9 |
9% |
miscellaneous |
8 |
8% |
preventive care free |
7 |
7% |
lifetime or yearly caps removed |
5 |
5% |
high risk pool enrollment |
4 |
4% |
medicare (donut hole, misc) |
3 |
3% |
pell grants |
3 |
3% |
child coverage without concern about pre-existing conditions |
2 |
2% |
business tax credits |
2 |
2% |
medicaid misc. |
|
1 |
1% |
federal heath clinics |
The majority mentioned that their (or someone else's) adult child could now be on their coverage. Still, a large number of people mentioned other things. If you quickly scanned the diary comments you might get the impression that the overwhelming majority of affirmative responses were for adult child coverage, but this presents a different perspective. While each other individual component of health care reform affects a small number of people, taken together they do add up (45%).
One observation is that 1% of all the comments in the diary mentioned favorably the ACA's high risk pools. That doesn't seem like a lot until you consider that only about 0.005% of the US population in enrolled in them... a factor of 200 between mentions and use (well, I told you this wasn't scientific.).
What does it all mean? You tell me.
But I thought you might be interested in the data.