While browsing a conservative website, I found a link to a poll on the Obamacare ruling: Obamacare and gay marriage SCOTUS poll. The post starts out by claiming that Obamacare is obviously popular because "Free money!", duh! It's a great conservative talking point in that it's short and plays into an existing narrative of the "liberal moocher", and I've heard and seen it repeated ad nauseam by conservatives. I decided to look into how many people are actually getting free money, and like many talking points, it's absolutely false. Less than 10% of the country is getting any sort of "free money" from Obamacare, a fact that is easily verified. The next time you hear somebody try to say that the only reason Obamacare is popular is because of moochers, ask them to guess how many people are getting free money from Obamacare, then hit them with the facts.
Even if you completely discount anyone who is even potentially eligible for any form of subsidy under Obamacare, a majority of Americans still approve of the SCOTUS decision on Obamacare.
Math and sources are below the fold.
Obamacare provides "free money" in two forms: expanded Medicaid coverage and subsidies to help people buy health insurance in the marketplace. There are about 320 million people living in the United States. In order to figure out how many people are clearly financially benefiting from Obamacare, we just need to find out how many people are getting subsidies and how many people are getting Medicaid expansion and add them up. In fact, rather than focus on people currently receiving money, we will total up the pool of all eligible recipients of Obamacare free money in order to provide a very conservative analysis.
Kaiser suggests that 17 million people will be eligible for tax credits in 2014. According to Obamacarefacts, as many as 21.3 million people could be eligible for Medicaid expansion. If you add this up, you get about 12% of the country as potentially eligible for Obamacare free money, with far fewer people actually receiving assistance right now. Charles Gaba, widely acknowledged Obamacare statistics expert, thinks that there are about 11 million people taking advantage of Medicaid expansion and about 13 million people that have signed up for healthcare on the exchanges, only some fraction of which receive subsidies. It's also important to note that Charles is trying to show as many enrollments as possible while maintaining rigorous statistical standards to provide support for the idea that Obamacare is helping as many people as possible. Using his data, less than 7% of the country is receiving free money under Obamacare.
I'm not surprised that the data doesn't support this conservative talking point. Hopefully we can start putting it to rest.