Must-Read: Brian Buetler: Obamacare Opinion Poll: Repeal Popularity Driven by Old People

…the practical implications of full repeal have made it a dead letter among all but the most reactionary conservatives in the Republican Party…. Bloomberg found that only 35 percent of American adults supports outright repeal…. [and] repeal and ‘repeal and replace’ are nearly coterminous…. Repeal is a fringe position… in that those who do support it reside disproportionately on the periphery of the law itself…. Dell Stone, quoted in the Bloomberg article, is a textbook case. Stone, 83, says she ‘certainly hopes’ the law gets repealed…. Stone’s antipathy to Obamacare stems from somewhere, but not from her interaction with the law itself. At 83, her frustrations with out-of-pocket health care costs are at best only tangentially related to Obamacare. She isn’t shopping for insurance on the federally facilitated Alabama exchange. She’s on Medicare. And she probably isn’t unhappy that the law increased her taxes because it almost certainly didn’t….

Among 18- to 64-year-olds—the people who pay for the law, or are eligible for the law’s benefits, or might become eligible for the law’s benefits at some point in the future—Obamacare is breakeven. Among… old people… 36 percent view the law favorably, while 46 percent view it unfavorably…. We shouldn’t give everyone’s views about Obamacare equal weight. The public sentiment animating the repeal movement is derived from people who have a negligible stake in the law, but who would like to throw millions of people off their new insurance plans…. Presumably we’d have no problem ignoring old people if they objected to child tax credits financed by working-age people. We should ignore them in this instance, too.