More than half the families in four deep red states have a member with a pre-existing condition

Remember the rate-shocked -- those folks who received cancellation notices on their insurance policies last fall and who were faced with steep rate hikes as the Affordable Care Act took full effect? They exist, for sure. But there are probably fewer of them than earlier estimates indicate.  And there can't be a lot of them in four red states spotlighted in the Times/Kaiser poll released this week.

The people in those states -- Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and North Carolina -- disapprove of the ACA by margins ranging from 31 points (AR. 62-29)  to 16 points (NC, 54-38), according to the poll. At the same time, however, majorities in each state, ranging from 57-60%, reported that someone in their household has a pre-existing condition. Think about that for a moment.

Red state attitudes toward the ACA: like America's, but more so

Update, 4/25:  see next post re the high rate of pre-existing conditions reported by respondents to this poll.

A New York Times/Kaiser Family Foundation poll released yesterday probes perceptions of the Affordable Care Act in four red states, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and North Carolina. * In all of these states, Obama's approval rating is in the 30s, and the ACA is also deep underwater, with approval/disapproval percentages ranging from 29/62  in Arizona to 38/54 in North Carolina.*

Those overall judgments, stoked by five years of relentless Republican denunciations and a barrage of negative advertising in recent months, are stark.  And yet, the underlying attitudes revealed in the poll's internals are strikingly congruent in key respects to the attitudes toward prospective healthcare reform recorded nationally in a Kaiser poll conducted in December 2008, when approval for a president-elect who had campaigned on a national healthcare overhaul was sky-high. 

In both polls, majorities opposed simply maintaining the pre-ACA status quo -- doing little or nothing to expand coverage in 2008, repealing the ACA today. In both, majorities favored government action to make health insurance available to people who could not get it from their employers. In both, majorities supported expanding Medicaid.  Yet in both, majorities rejected the notion that it was the federal government's responsibility to make affordable healthcare coverage available to all Americans.