A misleading ‘Obamacare’ poll, courtesy of the Chamber of Commerce and Harris Interactive

U.S. Chamber and Harris Interactive teamed up to lie to public about Obamacare in a recent survey.  Read the story from The Washington Post below that exposes the fraud.

Here are the important points.

--The survey was not a traditional random survey of businesses.  Instead it was an opt in of 499 U.S. Chamber members (think big businesses that hate Obamacare) and 805 non-U.S. Chamber members considered to be small businesses by Harris Interactive.  But since this group was not random and we don’t know what list they were drawn from, they could have all been from the National Federation of Independent Business (the NFIB is another Obamacare-hater group).

--The U.S. Chamber released the results of this poll like this:  “Despite the Administration’s delay of the employer mandate by a year, small businesses expect the requirement to negatively impact their employees. 27% say they will cut hours to reduce full time employees, 24% will reduce hiring, and 23% plan to replace full time employees (30 hours per week or more) with part-time workers to avoid triggering the mandate.”

--The U.S. Chamber wanted the public to believe that 74% of small business owners will be cutting employee hours or not hiring because of Obamacare.  Here is a tweet from Speaker of the House John Boehner, “Study: ‘74% of small businesses will fire workers, cut hours under #Obamacare.’”

--Close analysis of the survey and the results actually show something quite different. The actual number of  “small business” owners or executives in the survey saying that they might reduce employee hours or not hire was only 4.5 to 8.5 percent.  

The Washington Post story concludes, “the Chamber of Commerce got exactly what it paid for in this poll.”  That would be the U.S. Chamber, not those of us that actually represent small businesses.

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The Washington Post
July 31, 2013

A misleading ‘Obamacare’ poll, courtesy of the Chamber of Commerce and Harris Interactive

By Glenn Kessler

We have long warned readers about the perils of relying on data from opt-in Internet polls, especially those that make broad claims about estimating population values. We have given Pinocchios both to President Obama, for relying on an opt-in poll when he claimed that a majority of millionaires support the Buffett rule, and the National Rifle Association, for asserting that an opt-in poll reflected the views of the nation’s police.

This is a yet another case, but with a wrinkle. Here, the polling company, Harris Interactive, and the sponsor, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, presented the data in a highly misleading way — and then made false claims about the type of poll that had been conducted.

The Chamber has been a fierce opponent of the health-care law, a.k.a. Obamacare, and we frequently warn readers they should always be skeptical of polls peddled by partisan organizations. Perhaps it should be no surprise that this poll was released just as the GOP-led House of Representatives scheduled a vote to repeal the law.

Given the way the data was presented, Republican lawmakers thought they had been handed a gift — and ended up with egg on their faces.

Read more.

NFIB's hollow victory

The announcement yesterday that businesses with 50 or more employees would have an extra year to comply with the Obamacare requirement that they either provide health insurance or pay a penalty was greeted with glee by the National Federation of Independent Business.

“This is simply the latest evidence that implementation of this terrible law is going to be difficult if not impossible, and the burden is going to fall on the people who create American jobs,” said Amanda Austin, Director of Federal Public Policy with the NFIB.

But of course the NFIB is wrong as usual.  The delay of this provision will have very little impact on the implementation of Obamacare as I told the media last night.  Most businesses, about 97%, have fewer than 50 workers and thus were under no mandate to offer health insurance.  Of the remaining 3%, only 3% of them do not currently offer health insurance. 

So we’re talking about 3% of 3% of businesses for which this delay is good news.  Most of these are in the hospitality or staffing industries and are probably breathing a sigh of relief.

The employees of these affected businesses will now go into the insurance exchanges to obtain their insurance and receive premium assistance.  The October roll-out of these marketplaces has not been changed and neither has the individual mandate to have health insurance.  Will there be future hiccups in implementation?  Of course. 

But instead of cheering for this reprieve for a very small number of employers, the NFIB should be worrying.  For years this small-business pretender organization has been screaming that the employer mandate should be stopped because it was going to put companies out of business or drive up their costs or cause extensive job loss.

Now that the NFIB has gotten what it wants, if only for one year, the country is going to find out that Obamacare isn’t so bad after all.  For the real job-creators, small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, the NFIB can no longer hide behind their lies about mandates.  The exchanges should provide an easier path to being insured for the workers in these small businesses whether their employers do or do not offer health insurance. 

Fear of the unknown has been the ally of the NFIB and they hyped that fear with their untruths about the future under Obamacare.  Now the future is almost here and small businesses are going to find out that, as FDR told the nation in 1933, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.