A whole lot of people will be hurt if the Dems don't give in to the Republican demands.

[Octafish]

74. Talking About Obamacare: Does Policy Debate Matter?

By Bill Gardner
Washington Monthly blog, August 02, 2013 10:45 AM

American politicians have debated the Affordable Care Act since it was introduced to Congress in 2009. Have these debates affected what citizens think about the ACA? Daniel Hopkins can’t find evidence that those myriads of words mattered.

So, health policy bloggers: If Reid, Boehner, and McConnell can’t sway public opinion, despite the audiences they command, what do you hope to accomplish?

Hopkins is interested in the relationship between, on the one hand, the public debate about the ACA carried on in the media by the political elite and, on the other hand, public attitudes toward the ACA. To study the elite debate, he gathered 1488 press releases about the ACA issued by Senators in 2009 and 2010. To study public attitudes, he obtained text written by 30,000 survey respondents to the Kaiser monthly survey of public opinion on health policy. These masses of text allowed him to look at how elite debate and public attitudes evolved over time.

Hopkins then applied some very cool data mining technology to determine what the elites and the public were thinking as the debate progressed. His statistical methods found clusters of co-occurring words in the press releases and survey answers. These clusters formed meaningful rhetorical patterns. For example,

Supporters… make heavy use of a frame emphasizing universal access and affordability…, one defined by words such as “access,” “affordable,” “provide,” and “universal.”

Opponents of the ACA used different words.

For mass- and elite-level opponents of the ACA, the legislation’s cost and the increased governmental role it authorized were central reasons behind their opposition.

Hopkins interpreted these word patterns as ‘frames’, that is, contexts of meaning that structured how people thought about the ACA. Classic studies by Tversky and Kahneman showed that manipulating the framing of a survey question strongly affects how people understand and respond to the facts in that question.

Issue frames are rhetorical structures which emphasize a subset of the considerations relevant to an issue. Political issues are usually complex, giving elites the capacity to focus on aspects of the problem that advantage their side of the argument.

CONTINUED with links...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2013/08/talking_about_obamacare_does_p046174.php

PS: Thanks for grokking, LittleBlue. I don't blame Americans for not knowing the facts or big picture. I blame Corporate McPravda and Washington and their owners.