Obamacare Schadenfreude - Counting Down to King vs. Burwell

Yesterday's Obamacare Schadenfreude post featured a link to a WAPO article which suggested that Americans, while generally down on Obamacare, did not want to see the subsidies overturned in King vs. Burwell. David Harsanyi looks into the poll used, and finds, well, a bit of bias:

There’s No Proof Americans Want The Supreme Court To Save Obamacare - Recent polls are built to produce the answers Democrats desire

According to a new WaPo-ABC News poll, Americans oppose the Democrats’ health-care insurance reform, 54 to 39 percent. Yet, by a margin of 55-38 percent, more people say the court should not take action to block federal subsidies in states that didn’t set up own exchanges. This led the Michael Hiltziks of the world to declare that “Americans want to save Obamacare.”

This seems like a contradictory message – until you discover how WaPo frames the question:

and goes on to ask:

What would happen if you asked voters about something pertinent to the law? For instance:

Q: The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding the legality of the administration’s policy of handing out subsidies to millions of Americans though no such provision had ever appeared in the Affordable Care Act. Do you believe the executive branch should be allowed to dispense taxpayer funds in any way it sees fit whenever it feels like it, or should it be compelled to follow the law?

That’s just as accurate as the WaPo-ABC News question, though perhaps the polling numbers would look a bit different. Or how about this:

Q: The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding a case that could undermine the Obama administration’s health-care reform and, ultimately, allow states to set up their own systems and deal with health-care insurance on the local level. Do you believe the court should or should not allow them to do this?

Why it's almost as if they were trying to push people into expressing support for their position. An important point to remember, if an MSM outlet produces a poll, it's almost certainly slanted in the direction of the results they want to produce. Thanks to David Harsanyi for the reminder.

And just in case Judges Sotomayor or Ginsberg have a secret weakness for "A View from the Beach": Emails Reveal Jonathan Gruber’s Obamacare Work Was Of ‘Key Political Importance’

A top Obama administration health official considered putting MIT economist Jonathan Gruber to work on Obamacare to be an initiative of such “key political importance” that it was expedited because of “political push” from the Obama administration, emails released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reveal.

The agency released 750 pages of heavily-redacted records on Monday to The Daily Caller and other news outlets in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

In one telling exchange after Gruber’s Obamacare work was first reported in 2010, one HHS analyst told another that having Democrats in charge “across the board” would “stop some scrutiny” into the arrangement. Gruber’s work attracted scrutiny because the Obama administration failed to disclose the academic’s support for the health-care law without disclosing that he was paid $392,000 to help craft it.

The biggest takeaway from the emails is that they undermine one claim made by the Obama administration that Gruber was merely a bit player in the development of Obamacare. Described by many as the “architect” of the health-care law, Gruber was thrown under the bus after numerous videos surfaced last year of him bragging that Obamacare was passed because of “a lack of transparency” into the law and because the American people “were too stupid” to realize they were being manipulated into supporting it.

More importantly, this week, perhaps was Gruber's repeated contention that the law was designed to specifically limited subsidies to exchanges created by the states to coerce encourage states to form their own exchanges rather than rely on the federal exchange. Only 17 states ultimately attempted their own exchanges, and many of those suffered catastrophic failures.