A sizable chunk of the American public seems to have some confusion about the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law better known as Obamacare.
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One-third of Americans don't appear to know Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing
Americans have different views on Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act, even though they are the same thing.
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That is, they may not know it as Obamacare.
According to a Morning Consult poll published in The New York Times on Tuesday, just over one in three Americans surveyed did not realize that Obamacare and the ACA were the same thing.
Seventeen percent of respondents incorrectly said they were two different policies, while 18% said they did not know whether they were the same or different.
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The information gap also showed up when people were asked about their approval of the law. When asked whether they approved or disapproved of Obamacare, Americans were split, as 45% approved and 46% disapproved.
When asked, however, whether they supported the Affordable Care Act, 44% of people approved while just 40% disapproved.
Knowledge about the particulars of a potential repeal of the law was also lacking: 39% of people surveyed said they did not know or incorrectly stated that Medicaid subsidies would not go away if Obamacare is repealed.
According to the post from Kyle Dropp of Morning Consult and Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth University, the knowledge gap on Medicaid credits was split on a partisan line.
More than half (53%) of Republicans said they were unsure or responded incorrectly when asked about the impact of repeal on Medicaid subsidies. Only 21% of Democrats said they didn't know or incorrectly answered the question on Medicaid subsidies.
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The split comes as Republicans are taking steps to repeal the ACA in Congress while also attempting to draft and coalesce around a replacement. Recently, however, Republicans have shifted their tone regarding the ACA, choosing to call their plan a "repair" rel="noFollow" of the law rather than a "repeal."
At the same time, polls have shown the ACA's popularity slowly climbing as Democrats push the more popular aspects of the law, such as the more than 20 million people who have been covered through its various provisions.
The poll was conducted by Morning Consult, surveying 1,890 Americans on January 25 and 26 online with a margin of error of 2 percentage points in either direction.
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