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Comment by verall | Hacker News Reader

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verall·

In polling, the "affordable care act" and "ACA" poll better than "obamacare", even though they are the same thing:

https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/169541/name-...

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And the individual provisions of it tend to poll really well.

This is a typical result in public-opinion poli sci research, at least in the US. The descriptions of what programs do are almost always more popular than programs by name, often by a wide margin.

This is how you get weird shit like Trump making vague promises at rallies that sure sound like a call for some kind of stronger ACA or even single-payer healthcare. Many aspects of those things are broadly popular—the propagandized-against labels for them, however, are unpopular in some circles, especially if promoted by a person with the wrong letter next to their name.

The ultimate irony is that it was Mitt Romney who implemented it first as (Republican) governor of Massachusetts.

We should have kept calling it RomneyCare.

Romney got on board with the push for increasing healthcare coverage in MA and helped get the Medicare waiver required for MassHealth, but he didn't propose the system and vetoed significant parts of it, most of which was overridden by the state legislature. "Romneycare" was the name his GOP opponents gave it when he was running to be the Presidential nominee in 2012.

Obama suggested to Trump that he rename it after himself.

https://www.newsweek.com/barack-obama-donald-trump-obamacare...

Sort of like Obama proposing the same stuff as Mitt Romney did and calling it Obamacare instead of Romneycare

Obama suggested calling it Romneycare, and definitely didn't name it Obamacare.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/who-coi...

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