Their professors may still love it, but college students are going negative on Obamacare and the president whose name is often attached to it. “A new national poll of America’s 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP), located at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, finds a solid majority of Millennials disapprove of the comprehensive health reform package that the president signed into law in 2010, regardless of whether the law is referred to as the “Affordable Care Act (56 %: disapprove) or as “Obamacare” (57%: disapprove),” the Institute reports. “Less than three in ten uninsured Millennials say they will definitely or probably enroll in insurance through an exchange if and when they are eligible.”
“The IOP’s newest poll results— its 24th major release since 2000— also show a majority (52%) of Millennials would choose to recall all members of Congress if it were possible—and a slightly smaller proportion saying [sic] the same about President Obama (47% recall, 46% not recall) . The poll also finds President Obama’s job approval rating at the lowest level reported (41%) since the beginning of his presidency.”
“Between 50 (when ACA is used) and 51 percent (when Obamacare is used) of young people believe their cost of care will increase under the health reform law; approximately one-in-ten (10% under ACA, 11% under Obamacare) tell us that their costs will likely decrease,” according to the executive summary of the survey. Meanwhile, “By a margin of more than two-to-one, young people under the age of 30 believe that the quality of their care will get worse under the new health care provisions.”
That students, whose professors are most likely to be cheerleaders for Obamacare, should be so pessimistic about its success is a source of wonder. Reading on into the survey is another surprise.
For years, perhaps decades, college and university administrators had no trouble recruiting students to lobby for increased government funding for higher education, largely on the premise that such subsidies would keep the cost of college down. A cadre of collegiate would dutifully make signs and march in front of state capitols and even the U. S. Congress in the hopes that government spending would result in decreased college costs, despite clear trends that the very opposite invariably occurred.
The credulity of the student body in accepting that pitch may be coming to an end. The Harvard study found that, “When Millennials were asked who is most responsible for the rising amount of student debt in the U.S., 42 percent said colleges and universities, 30 percent the federal government — students and state governments were held responsible by 11 and eight percent respectively.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
