The implementation of the Affordable Care Act may cause its downfall, but not for the reasons everyone suspects. …
Decades of polling demonstrate that Americans trust the federal government much less than state governments. Americans believe that state governments work better and are more capable of catering to their specific needs. Consequently, people are more resistant to federally run programs, which can create a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more people doubt the federal government’s effectiveness, the more they will focus on its errors, increasing the attention paid to policy failure.
To examine how distrust in federal programs might affect the Affordable Care Act, we ran a 2,000 person national survey. CONT.
Kyle Dropp, Molly Jackman & Saul Jackman, Brookings