One Michigan women shows how irrational voters can be.
There’s more news out of Michigan in the ongoing debate over who wins and loses under Obamacare. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has been following the strange tale of Julie Boonstra, a woman with cancer recently feature in a number of anti-Obamacare advertisements that Republicans have been paying to air in the Great Lakes State.
But there’s good news! The Detroit News crunched the numbers and discovered that Boonstra will save over a thousand dollars a year thanks to her new Obamacare plan compared with her old one:
Boonstra’s old plan cost $1,100 a month in premiums or $13,200 a year, she previously told The News. That didn’t include money she spent on co-pays, prescription drugs and other out-of-pocket expenses.
By contrast, the Blues’ plan premium costs $571 a month or $6,852 for the year. Since out-of-pocket costs are capped at $5,100 for in-network doctors and hospitals, including deductibles, the maximum Boonstra would pay this year for all of her cancer treatment is $11,952.
When advised of the details of her Blues’ plan, Boonstra said the idea that it would be cheaper “can’t be true.”
“I personally do not believe that,” Boonstra said.
I suppose it is possible that The Detroit News goofed up the numbers here and Boonstra really knows best, but then again it’s quite possible Boonstra really didn’t realize that she would be saving money. After all lots of people don’t really understand their health care plans, health care plans are complicated!
The reality thought is that these sorts of misconceptions in politics are pretty common for all sorts of regular voters. Journalists often write about voters as well informed hyper-rational beings that absorb lots of information about politics and policy and then vote based on who “made their case” during election season. But as you can see with Boonstra, lots of times voters see policy and political reality through the lens of their partisan or ideological affiliations. Thus lots of Republican voters assumed that Iraq had links to 9/11 even though there is no evidence that this is true. Or likewise Democrats believed in the 80’s that inflation went up during Reagan’s presidency even though it actually went down.
This doesn’t mean that voters and stupid or out of touch, it just means that they often take their clues on things like policy directly from their partisan leaders, not their own research or experience. Which is typically the opposite of how the media portrays political cause and effect.
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