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Running Head: Gallup: Americans’ Views of Healthcare Law Improve

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Gallup: Americans’ View of Healthcare Law Improve

Gallup: American’s View of Healthcare Law Improve

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Article: Americans’ Views of Healthcare Law Improve, written by Jeffrey M. Jones on Gallup. http://www.gallup.com/poll/184079/americans-views-healthcare-law-improve.aspx?utm_source=polls&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=tiles

Following the Supreme Court’s overruling of a second legal challenge to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the Gallup conducted a survey to collect the Americans’ views concerning the Affordable Care Act (Gallup, 2015). According to Gallup, Americans approval of the law rose to 47 percent which is its highest ever since 2012. However, the Americans’ likelihood to disapprove the law is still higher than the rate of approval, though, the latter is improving. The results discussed in the article are based on the Gallup polls conducted between July 1 and July 5, 2015, about five days after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the case of King v. Burwell. The bone of contention in the case was the Affordable Care Act’s provision for tax credits to subsidize individual’s health plans purchased through insurance exchanges (Gallup, 2015). Prior to the ruling, the law held that only those who purchased insurance through exchanges established by states were eligible for subsidies. But the Supreme Court made it clearer by ruling that despite the plain language that only those in states with state-run exchanges are eligible for the tax credits, the law intended for people to get subsidized coverage through a state-run exchange or federal exchange. Currently, only 16 states have their own exchanges while people from other states without state-run exchanges have to purchase the insurance through federally run exchanges (Gallup, 2015).

Population and Sample

The population that was interviewed totaled to 2,013 adults aged 18 and above, living in all 50 states of the United States of America and the District of Columbia. The population density targets were obtained from the 2010 national census. Since the survey was conducted using the phone interviewing technique, both landline and cellular telephone numbers were selected using the random-digit-dial methods. Each sample of the adults comprised a minimum quota of 50 percent cellphone respondents and 50 percent landline respondents. The random sampling was used in order to obtain an even distribution of the entire population without being subject to biasness. Although the views of over 318 million Americans may not be accurately represented by a sample of 2,013, the sampling criteria used ensured the views of the Americans from all the 50 states and the District of Columbia were collected. In addition, the sample represents a population that is likely to respond the same way and behave in a similar way.

Methods: The survey was conducted through telephone interviews of the sample population between July 1-3 and 5, shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling concerning the Affordable Care Act. The interview was conducted in English and also in Spanish for respondents who primarily speak in Spanish.

Parameter and Statistic: A parameter is a measure that describes the entire population in a given survey while statistics describe a sample of the population (Boddy & Smith, 2009). In this case, the results were statistics since they were used to describe a randomly selected sample of the population.

Confidence Interval and Margin error: the confidence interval is a measure of how accurate the values are from the mean (Boddy & Smith, 2009). The confidence interval is obtained by calculating the margin error. The margin error gives the negative and positive distribution from the mean above which values are considered to be outliers (Boddy & Smith, 2009). The outliers are the extreme values that does not match with the rest of the sample. In this case the margin error was ±3 and hence the 95% confidence can then be generated from the mean given the marginal error.

Interview Questions: There were two interview questions asked during the survey. The two questions include the following.

1. Do you generally approve or disapprove of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama that restructured the U.S. health care system?

2. As you may know, a number of the provisions of the healthcare law have already gone into effect. So far, has the new law– [ROTATED: helped you and your family, not had an effect, (or has it) hurt you and your family]? As you may know, a number of the provisions of the healthcare law have already gone into effect. So far, has the new law– [ROTATED: helped you and your family, not had an effect, (or has it) hurt you and your family]?

The questions were relevant, objective, simple and less biased. The questions can be answered by both sexes and by all races hence eliminating any kind of biasness. Besides, the open-ended nature of the questions gave respondents opportunity to explain their responses.

Conclusion

In summary, the survey was conducted to obtain the Americans’ views concerning the 2010 Affordable Care Act in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling about the provisions of the healthcare law. According to the survey, 47 percent of the Americans have approved the Affordable Care Act while 48 percent have disapproved it. The remaining 5 percent of the population are yet to decide on whether to approve or disapprove the Affordable Care Act. Although the majority still disapprove the healthcare law, the number of those who have approved the law is rising gradually.

Reference

Boddy, R., & Smith, G. (2009). Statistical methods in practice. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley.

Gallup, I. (2015). Americans' Views of Healthcare Law Improve. Gallup.com. Retrieved 26 August 2015, from http://www.gallup.com/poll/184079/americans-views-healthcare-law-improve.aspx?utm_source=polls&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=tiles