On the eve of Obamacare enrollment beginning, Americans are still confused about the law, according to polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation/NBC.
Americans remain deeply divided on the Affordable Health Care Act, with half confused about how it works or worried about how much it will cost them, a new poll shows. [...]
Just over half said they were worried, while slightly less said they were confused. Twenty-nine percent said they were angry about the ACA, compared to just 24 percent who described themselves as enthusiastic. [...]
While just a quarter of Democrats say they are worried about it, three-fourths of Republicans fret. More than half of Republicans say they're angry, with numbers even higher among Tea Party members; only 12 percent of Democrats say they feel the same.
Many of those fretting are doing so because they've been bombarded by so many lies and so much misinformation about the law. Those are lies that
Chuck Todd says aren't the media's responsibility to debunk. He says it's President Obama's job to do that. But
another Kaiser Family Foundation poll says that the
public feels differently.
At the same time that much of the public reports a need for basic information on the ACA, a majority (56 percent) say the news media’s coverage of the law has been focused on politics and controversies, while very few (6 percent) say coverage has been mostly about how the law will impact people.
The result of that imbalance in reporting: "When asked to name a source in the news media that they trust for information about the health care law, more than half (53 percent) say they don’t trust any source. [...]" Of course, among those who do trust the media, the highest level of confidence in the media is in Fox News viewers, which also helps explain why there's so much fear out there. And why Chuck Todd and his non-Fox cohorts should have been reporting on something other than the political fights.