Polling analysis: Obamacare has potential to be far more popular than conventional wisdom suggests

Clifford Young, managing director of Ipsos Public Affairs' Polling, does a great service in breaking down the polling on the Affordable Care Act. And guess what? Every provision of it, with the exception of the mandate, is really popular.

Which is why a good chunk of what House Republicans are talking about doing, now that they figure they better do something about that replace thingy they've been talking about so much, is cribbed from the Affordable Care Act. They want to keep the popular stuff and look good.

So what's going on that makes the law overall unpopular, generally polling in the 40+ approval and 45-ish disapproval? Its complexity, the continuing misinformation campaign against it that confuses people on what exactly is in the bill, and'here's a familiar refrain to dirty hippies'a sizable chunk who disapprove because the law didn't go far enough to reform our health care system.

On fuzzy issues like healthcare reform, we may not be measuring what we actually think we are measuring. We have found that those who oppose the measure do so for very different reasons (see here). Indeed, almost a third of the people who oppose the measure do so because they believe that it did not go far enough. Most of these nay-sayers tend to be staunch Democrats (see table below).

Young's analysis backs up polling we've seen before, notably from the Kaiser Family Foundation on the wild popularity of most provisions, with the single exception of the mandate. Now, if the Supreme Court cared at all about popular opinion, their way forward would be pretty clear. While it would be a radical departure from precedent to strike down the mandate, they could limit their ruling to just it (assuming they don't leave the whole law intact).

How to replace the mandate? Easy, the constitutional and the popular solution: expand Medicare. Enroll the uninsured in Medicare, withholding the premiums from their pay, possibly on a sliding scale to ensure affordability. You open up the popular public option and increase the premium-paying base for that program, shoring up Medicare finances at the same time. It's a political and policy win.

Of course, Democrats have to keep the White House and Senate'and regain the House'to achieve that, and the Supreme Court would have to not go insane.