NPR with Ipsos polls put together a set of simple questions to find out what people understand about the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare. It turns out, across the board, people have a profoundly limited understanding of what the ACA has accomplished.
Democrats were better informed than Republicans, with 54 percent of Democrats saying the law had reduced the number of people without insurance, compared to 41 percent of Republicans.
One problem, Pierce said, is that the law was passed in 2010 but didn't go fully into effect for years. In that time, the website that housed the insurance exchange, the most public part of the program, failed.
"By the time the insurance rate started to fall, a lot of minds were already set," he said.
NPR points out that the “death panel” discussions definitely had the dumb impact we all feared it did, with only 18 percent of respondents realizing that the ACA didn’t put limits on end-of-life care. Of course, Republicans knew the least about the ACA and healthcare questions when asked, but you can’t expect much from a group of people that have Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as their leaders. If you would like to look at a visualization of this healthcare ignorance, you can check out Chris Reeves recent diary on the matter.