“The knowledge of basic civics is pretty low.”

By Kate Pickert | @katepickert | February 24, 2011 | +

It’s no secret that Democrats aren’t always great at communicating their message to the public, especially when it comes to health care. Poll after poll has shown this. At the height of the health care debate, Americans remained confident in their work-sponsored health insurance, even though it’s being eroding and Democrats were trying mightily to convince Americans that the whole system badly needed an overhaul. Lots of Americans, including seniors, believed Democratic health care reform would gut Medicare, even though the Affordable Care Act (ACA) leaves standard Medicare benefits unchanged and extends the life of the program.

But a new survey out today really takes the cake. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan research organization that does the best polling on health care, half of all Americans either think the ACA has already been repealed or aren’t sure. (click to enlarge)

The House repealed the law and minority Senate Republicans voted to do so, but actual repeal would need to be passed by both chambers and signed by President Obama.

The Democratic message on health care right now is: Republicans want to repeal the law and take away the benefits you’re already getting – coverage for adult children, coverage for childrens’ pre-existing conditions, prescription drug rebates for seniors, etc. But this message doesn’t even have a chance to get through to more than half the public, which thinks the whole message was made moot by repeal of the law. This also means not very many Americans are actually benefiting from the small pieces of the law that have been implemented already.

Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote today that he wasn’t necessarily shocked by his poll’s findings, but still found them disappointing.

First, people are very busy just getting through the day and they don’t have a lot of time to sort through news reports about the policymaking process. They see the word “repeal” in the local paper or hear it on TV and think the law has been repealed. Second, there may be some partisan wishful thinking going on; 30 percent of Republicans think the law has been repealed while only 12 percent of Democrats do. But overall, it is obvious that the knowledge of basic civics is pretty low.

Altman thinks a heavy new dose of Schoolhouse Rock might held the public be more educated on the legislative process. What do you think?

Related Topics: affordable care act, kaiser family foundation, medicare, Health Care

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jsfox

I’m not sure why anybody should be surprised. Most American care more about what is happening on American Idol than they do about what their government is and is not doing.
afguy

“Schoolhouse Rock” might be a bit over their heads at the moment.
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Like with the mule, you’ll need a 2×4 to get their “attention” first…
southernbell49

Gee, what a surprise. Not.

American reporters do an excellent and courageous job of covering events in other countries but the MSM stinks to high heaven when it comes to bringing straight news to their own fellow citizens. CNN is just dreadful. Instead of just the facts, Maam, they now offer left/right (slanted toward the right) interpretation of facts. And the ABC, NBC and CBS’s nightly news segments do not offer substantial segments on complicated subjects.

Walter Chronkite must be turning over in his grave.
afguy

Maybe we need a Mr. Rogers.
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“Can you say ‘Senator X is a lying SOB’… I knew you could.”
westender3

All the more reason why more money should be cut from education.
hippooath

When Media speculate why so many are ignorant I smile.
afguy

Whenever I see Chuck Toddler’s face on the teevee, I am tempted to throw things.
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Luckily, the Missus has removed all of the heavy objects from within arm’s reach.
nflfoghorn

CNN does the ACTUAL “we report, you decide” thing. Unfortunately our views have been so colored by other sources that being impartial doesn’t really count for much anymore.
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Oh no.
Oh yes!
afguy

Anyone else think that CNN started to go downhill when the “Mouth of the South” got out?
nflfoghorn

What? Being the next great singing talent is less important than how government works???
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That brings to mind this: Media (the legit kind) do a poor job with extrapolation. When a network says “The House will cut funding of XXX” and don’t immediately follow up with “but it must still pass the Senate and face a probable veto from the President” then it’s not doing its job and, at worst, is misleading the public.
nflfoghorn

Jimmy Hart???
afguy

Sir Ted of Turner.
gysgt213

There’s also a report by the liberals at Goldman Saks that the cuts the republicans are pushing will in fact hurt our economy. But lets hire more republicans voices.
nflfoghorn

CNN doesn’t care about ratings. It’s so ubiquitous that they make $ wherever they are – other countries, online, mobile, etc. They’ll wait for a big story to blow up and attach to it like an alligator in a death roll. I guess that’s how it stays relevant.
http://gum0nshoe.wordpress.com gumOnShoe

The state of the american government is not a priority for the average american. Nor is being informed about it. They want to get up, go to work, get home & relax.

Pay the bills & raise their families.

That’s why they are so, so easy to shepherd. Just make sure you don’t try to use anything that relies on facts when you’re doing your shepherding. Appeal to common sense, generally accepted “truths,” and tell anecdotes that make you sound familiar and you’ll win everytime. The country itself may lose afterward, but you know, you’ll win.

;0
afguy

They were different in the first Gulf War. They were as important to the coverage as al Jezeera English was to events in Egypt.
http://grapemusing.blogspot.com/ grape_crush

Jimmy Hart???
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My first reaction as well.
nflfoghorn

@ 3.8: [giggles]
shepherdwong

“First, people are very busy just getting through the day and they don’t have a lot of time to sort through news reports about the policymaking process.”

The Nielsen Co.’s “Three Screen Report” — referring to televisions, computers and cellphones — for the fourth quarter said the average American now watches more than 151 hours of TV a month. That’s about five hours a day and an all-time high, up 3.6% from the 145 or so hours Americans reportedly watched in the same period last year.

They’re disaffected and disinformed when it comes to politics. That is all.
pintortwo

It’s no secret that Democrats aren’t always great at communicating their message to the public, especially when it comes to health care.
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“Aren’t always great”? It’s often on purpose, especially when it comes to health care– I think they’d rather we forgot some of those pre-election messages.
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Difference is, the right has better message amplifiers. And why not? -they’re the ones that gave our elected the script.
filmnoia

GumOnShoe beat me to the punch. Most people think that if they go to the polls every 2 or 4 years (usually 4 years) that they’ve completed their civic responsibility, and that the politicians will keep the house in order.
Today, more than ever, with many households having two income earners, people are too stressed out by keeping up with bills, college tuition, etc. to pay much attention to the news on TV, let alone read a newspaper.

Fox figured this out years ago. Keep it simple, and repeat the same thing over and over – phrases like “government take over of healthcare”, “socialist”,
“government is the problem”, etc. etc.

It’s not like people are dumb so much as they are overwhelmed.
If our schools did a better job in critical thinking skills we would then have a better informed electorate. The last thing the GOP and the Right Wing want is a populace that functions with a rational, thinking, critical brain. It’s in their interest to keep people bamboozled, and in this they have succeeded.
Once they have completed the destruction of labor unions, the downland slide towards Third World irrelevancy will be completed. We will become a country of paper pushers and shoe salesmen.
sciurini

“It’s no secret that Democrats aren’t always great at communicating their message to the public”
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Wrong
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It’s no secret that the Media isn’t great at communicating the truth to the public.
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The Media reports what Fox distorts.
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It’s sad (or funny) that Comedy Central has the only show that highlights the misinformation in the media today.
earljr1

Democrats explaining the nuances of Obamacare? Good luck with that.
A team of lawyers at our hospital have been studying this mish mash of legislation for months now and the only conclusion reached….it will increase cost significantly, the insurance companies have MORE control on allocating (rationing) health care, it is well nigh impossible to manage and our seniors are paying a higher penalty than any other segment of our population.
Gee, I wonder why they have not done a better job of communicating these facts?
Look at Nov. 2010 for some of the answers.
afguy

Exactly.
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The most upset I’ve seen on of our resident trolls was when I suggested that he start “thinking for himself” rather than relying on talking points.
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My daughter is a TP’er. Can’t reason with her so I’ve simply recommended that she start reading a variety of sources for her information.
sisword

It’s no secret that mainstream news would rather provide exciting headlines that drive traffic rather than information that educates and provides context for the public. That’s why Time’s Kate Pickert leads a post about a Republican-appointed judge ruling against ACA with “Big blow to the the Obama administration”, while a post about a Dem-appointed judge ruling for ACA leads with “Obama Admin scores legal win” with “well-worn” arguments.

I know that reaffirming solid legal arguments can become kinda boring Kate – hopefully the Obama administration will come up with some novel sexy arguments re: ACA soon, so that you can have a better lede.
freeinpa

“It’s no secret that Democrats aren’t always great at communicating their message to the public”
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This is a lie started by the Democrats and spread by the media. The reality is it’s not the communication it’s the message!!!!!

–The majority of the country does not like it.
stuartzechman

Kate Pickert:
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If the American people’s awareness of this key policy and political issue is this poor and uninformed, how likely is it that the general conduct, standards, methods and conventions of the political press corps comprise a significant factor in that public mis-perception and ignorance?
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From reading that piece to which you linked, I know that former “major university” professor –Kaiser’s Drew Altman– is so genuinely shocked from his lofty CEO perch atop a supremely wealthy family’s endowed foundation at his fellow citizens’ blissful incompetence as they go about their “busy” lives (doing whatever it is these common people do), that he apparently just cannot imagine his beloved New York Times doing anything other than their current, superlative, stellar performance. Even so, Altman’s anecdotal, unsourced conjecture on why folks so unlike him remain uninformed isn’t real reporting on the situation, right, Kate Pickert?
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So, is there anything at all that the political media –from the WSJ/FOXNews/NY Post to CNN/TIME.com/Washington Post to NY Times/NBC/Huffington Post– can be doing better or more (or less) consistently, or are the institutions of establishment political journalism doing the best possible job of informing a (simultaneously) lazy and supremely busy electorate of semi-literate dolts who, nevertheless, somehow seem to hold down jobs, pay their bills and operate complex, hand-held, mobile computing devices?
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Thanks so much in advance for the explanation, Kate Pickert.
allthingsinaname

Do I have that correct; Thirty percent of Republicans think the law has been repealed?
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30%? Knowledge of basic Civics pretty low for whom?
bobell

It might also help clear things up ever so slightly if the media got a bit closer to accuracy than their recent track record indicates. All those headlines saying “House Repeals Health Care Bill” were both literally and substantively false. When a law is repealed, it ceases to be on the books. The ACA never budged. It remains in full force and effect. The House voted in favor of repealing it, but that is no more a true repeal than my decision to vote for John McCain in 2008 (that’s a hypothetical; I actually voted for the other guy) elected him President.
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It’s a variation on the candidate’s “I passed a bill protecting widows and orphans.” Let’s not bother arguing whether the bill does or does not protect anyone. The candidate sure as he!! did not PASS that bill. The entire legislative branch passed that bill, and the head of the executive branch signed it into law. (At the national level, that’s the Congress and the President, for those of you – and there are so many — who flunked civics.) The legislator may have favored, sponsored, and maybe even introduced the bill. But pass it? No way.
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Okay, okay, it’s jargon. But the media should leave the jargon to the politicians and report the facts in straight English. People are so good at misunderstanding what’s true, why feed them stuff that’s false?
americanwithabrain

This has to hurt if you’re on the left. No further comment is necessary.
freeinpa

“Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote today that he wasn’t necessarily shocked by his poll’s findings, but still found them disappointing.”
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No mention as to whether he was disappointed by Speaker Pelosi saying you will have to pass it to find out what’s in it? When the vast majority of the the Congress voting for it, didn’t read it how can he be disappointed in the public.
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Or the head of the party writing the bill goes around the country saying if you like your insurance you can keep it or if you like your doctor you can keep him. Maybe the folks saying that the bill was repealed was actually their wish.
chupkar

This. No amount of education is going to make the people who do not care to follow anything but soundbytes learn more or care to learn more. Sad but true. To them, the loudest is what gets through and that is all they will know.
liberalmeltdown

What do you expect? They voted for a president that said that doctors cut people’s feet off so that they can make a few extra bucks.
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And of course: Hopey Changey which is now “winning the future.”
http://erieangel.wordpress.com erieangel

“the insurance companies have MORE control on allocating (rationing) health care”
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Really? Interesting, here I thought the PPACA was a government take over of health care that would include a government “death panel” charged with rationing care.
shepherdwong

Already answered, Stuart.

It’s no secret that Democrats aren’t always great at communicating their message to the public, especially when it comes to health care. Poll after poll has shown this.

See, there’s no Republican lie machine and so the political press doesn’t do a piss-poor job of explaining the truth about their lies to the public. It’s all the Democrats’ fault.
earljr1

Poor erie, she (quite unintentionally) ALMOST got it right.
Rationed health care, erie, means someone, other than your doctor, will be making the decision on how and when you get treated.
If you are comfortable with this, then by ALL means, continue your blind obedience to Obamacare. (this is tantamount to driving through a busy intersection with your eyes closed)