Gallup: ObamaCare still viewed negatively by majority

Well, Nancy Pelosi promised that we wouldn’t know all of the marvels of ObamaCare until it passed. We’re now four solid months into its rollout, and … it’s still as unpopular as ever, according to Gallup:

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President Barack Obama defended his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, before Congress and the nation last week in his State of the Union address, but public opinion toward the law is little changed since November. Americans are still more likely to disapprove (51%) than approve (41%) of the law.

The latest results, from a Gallup poll conducted Jan. 31-Feb. 1, show that even though many provisions of the law are now in effect, Americans’ views of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare,” still tilt negative.

For the most part, Americans haven’t seen much impact, with 64% saying that the law has had no effect – down slightly from 69% in December. Another 19% say that it has hurt their families, which combine up for 83%, or about the level of people who already had insurance (85% in 2009). Only 13% say the law has helped their families, which is up four points from December’s 9%, but that shift is in the margin of error for the survey, too. Only 24% believe it will help their families “in the long run,” with 37% believing it will be a net negative. Those aren’t numbers that point to a big rebound in confidence for ObamaCare, or the politicians who pushed it.

A few more of these stories may make things a lot worse in the near future, too:

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“I was thinking at that time, this doesn’t sound right at all,” Guillory said.

The next time he got a call, Guillory began to question the person on the other end.

“I told them, ‘I tried to contact y’all a couple times and this is not a legitimate number.’ They hung up immediately,” Guillory explained.

That led to a flood concerns for Guillory, who now wondered how the mystery person got his personal information. He feels it has to be connected to signing up for insurance on HealthCare.gov.

“Has to be. There’s no other way for those people to have known that I was looking for insurance,” Guillory said.

The other victim in this case is a woman from Virginia Beach, who prefers not to be identified. It was her phone number that popped up on Guillory’s caller ID, but she wasn’t making the calls.  Her number also appeared on the caller ID of others and many called her with similar concerns.

She says the mystery caller somehow made the calls appear as if they were coming from her cell number.

“That’s when I learned that my number had been spoofed, and I had no idea what that even was,” she says.

CMS media director Aaron Albright released this statement after the segment aired:

When consumers fill out their online Marketplace applications, they can trust that the information that they are providing is protected by stringent security standards.  To date, there have been no successful security attacks on healthcare.gov and no person or group has maliciously accessed personally identifiable information from the site…Security testing is conducted on an ongoing basis using industry best practices to appropriately safeguard consumers’ personal information. The security of the system is also monitored by sensors and other tools to deter and prevent any unauthorized access.

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The claim that no successful hacks have occurred can only be made, cybersecurity expert David Kennedy said two weeks ago, because CMS and HHS have no systems in place to detect them. Kennedy managed to access that data very easily, and ended up seeing tens of thousands of records in just a few minutes’ work, without even bothering to hack the site. And if it’s that easy to find, then we may as well just consider them hacked already — as if we’d entered the data in Sochi.

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Beege Welborn 5:00 PM | December 24, 2024
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