Saturday, June 23, 2012

Healthcare law -- would somebody help me understand what people want?

Perhaps the Supreme Court is working this one for dramatic effect -- June is rapidly drawing to a close, and there's no word yet on the Court's rulings on the ACA.  This reaches back to the cases brought to it in March on the healthcare law enacted in 2010.  According to a calender that shows on the Court's web site, there is some kind of scheduled session for next Monday the 25th of June, and then nothing else is shown after that.

Maybe the news will come on Monday, but it will have to come out sometime next week or there will be a whole lot of disappointed people.

Actually, no matter what the news out of the Supreme Court is on the healthcare law, it looks like most Americans will be disappointed with the results.  That's so if the results of a recent survey are to be believed.

Pew Research Center does a really good job of conducting surveys and reporting on public opinions.  A current survey, conducted in mid-June (June 7 - 17) as a preliminary to the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling on the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law of 2010, seems to show that more people will be "unhappy" instead of "happy" with any potential ruling by the Supremes.

It makes my head spin trying to think this one through, so I'm just going to go with the flow now.

Take a look at this:
 

In all three Supreme Court outcomes, more people are unhappy than are happy.  In each case, a small portion says that they "don't know" how they will feel; that's a puzzler, too.

Now look at this:
 
It looks like an overwhelming majority of people implores the government to take some action to mitigate what they pay for healthcare, as well as to broaden its scope of availability in some way.  And yet this feeling coexists with a concern that our government has involved itself too much in the nation's healthcare.

Maybe those feelings can be reconciled somehow, but I'm struggling with it.

If anybody has this figured out, I'd love to hear about that figuring.

One thing seems certain:  The Supreme Court is not going to have the last word on this subject; the conversation is going to continue even after the ruling is known.



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