This doesn't surprise me:
Poll: Americans Think Obamacare Will Help the Poor, Not the CountrySome of this is because middle-class Americans tend to regard their current health insurance as good (which for many of them is reasonable). and also as secure (which is not so reasonable). Some of this is because the law does create some "losers" among the self-insured in the middle and upper middle classes.
More Americans continue to say that President Obama's health care law will help the poor and the uninsured rather than their own families or the country overall, the latest United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll has found.
... these findings show that most adults, particularly whites, view it largely as a transfer program that will mostly benefit the poor rather than the nation broadly.
... solid majorities of Americans continue to say they believe it will "make things better" for people who do not have health insurance (63 percent) and the poor (59 percent).
... the poll also finds that most Americans, especially whites, are much more dubious that the law will benefit broader groups in the country, or their own families. That confounds the anticipation of Democratic strategists who have hoped for decades that health care reform could reverse the skepticism among many voters, particularly middle-class whites, that Washington can deliver tangible benefits in their own lives.
Relatively few voters, especially whites, are anticipating such benefits from the health care law, the poll found. Overall, just 33 percent said they expected the law will make things better for "people like you and your family," while 49 percent said they thought it would make things worse....
But it's also because we don't think there's a national benefit to universal coverage. No one has successfully made the case that there are tangible benefits from having a covered country (a healthier populace, less health care done at the costly emergency-room level). The moral notion -- that a rich country damn well ought to be able to provide health care for all its citizens -- doesn't seem to mean much to the middle class.
And, well, the right has said for fifty years that benefits apart from Social Security and Medicare are a zero-sum game. That message clearly hasn't lost its potency.
Aimai has been arguing in comments that much of the middle class is slipping into economic insecurity -- as she says, they're "busy fighting to keep their own jobs and their own SNAP and UI benefits." But this poll suggests that this isn't leading them to regard their interests as aligned with those of the people below them on the ladder. They still have, in Barbara Ehrenreich's phrase, a "fear of falling." They haven't accepted the premise that Obamacare will help catch them. They have accepted the premise that Obamacare will push them.
