Americans Ignorant About Healthcare Reform Law; President Promises Fix

A new poll reveals half the nation is clueless about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and yesterday President Barack Obama promised to do something about it.

A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 49 percent of Americans say they don’t have enough information about healthcare reform to know how it will affect them or their families. Four in 10 Americans claim to be unaware that the ACA is still in effect, with 7 percent believing the Supreme Court had overturned the law and 12 percent believing it had been repealed by Congress.

The president yesterday told reporters that “we are pushing very hard to make sure that we’re hitting all the deadlines and the benchmarks,” but added that he expected there to be “glitches and bumps.”

Or a “train wreck.” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), one of the original sponsors of the ACA, famously predicted that last week during a Senate hearing. “The administration’s public information campaign on the benefits of the Affordable Care Act deserves a failing grade,” he told Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during her testimony. “You need to fix this.”

Building the exchanges “is still a big complicated piece of business,” President Obama admitted in the press conference, and that roadblocks from Republicans, especially by not providing adequate funding, were making it more difficult.

The administration needs to bring the exchanges online by Oct. 1 when open enrollment begins for 2014. The Kaiser Family Foundation survey revealed that a majority of the most at-risk populations, those with low incomes and/or uninsured, say they lack enough information how the ACA will affect them and their family (56 percent and 58 percent, respectively).