…by convincing a majority of Americans that it’s not the federal government’s duty to provide healthcare. Gallup finds that opinion has flipped since Obama’s first election to the presidency.
PRINCETON, N.J. — For the third consecutive year, a majority of Americans (52%) agree with the position that it is not the federal government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans have healthcare coverage. Prior to the start of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2009, a majority of Americans consistently took the opposite view.
The most recent data were collected in Gallup’s annual Health and Healthcare poll, conducted Nov. 6-9. Gallup first asked this question in 2000, when 59% of Americans said it was the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare. This sentiment peaked at 69% in 2006. Americans’ attitudes began to shift in the 2008 poll, conducted just after Obama was elected, and became evenly divided after Obama took office in 2009. During this time, Republicans and independents became more likely to say universal healthcare was not the government’s responsibility, most probably in reaction to Obama’s campaign promise that he was going to attempt to do just that. This non-government-involvement view became more pronounced in 2012 and has been the majority opinion in the U.S. over the past three years.
The Obama administration’s pattern of dishonesty has surely helped spur the switch. For the latest on that, Bloomberg reports that the administration fudged the most recent Obamacare enrollment numbers.
The Obama administration included as many as 400,000 dental plans in a number it reported for enrollments under the Affordable Care Act, an unpublicized detail that helped surpass a goal for 7 million sign-ups.
Without the dental plans, the federal government would have had 6.97 million people with medical insurance under the law known as Obamacare, investigators for the House Oversight and Government Reform committee calculated, using data they obtained from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Federal officials said in September they had 7.3 million people enrolled in coverage through new government-run insurance exchanges. They didn’t distinguish between medical and dental plans, breaking from previous practice without notice.
It’s just lies and deceptions all the way down, from the “most transparent administration in American history.”
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