All else equal, education is good, but education isn't going to make everyone into healthcare policy wonks, nor is that necessarily a good use of everyone's tim

All else equal, education is good, but education isn't going to make everyone into healthcare policy wonks, nor is that necessarily a good use of everyone's time. Which... is a problem when the programs are designed so that you more or less have to be a healthcare policy wonk to understand them. Obamacare is unpopular in part because it's incredibly complex. On the political side that makes it an easy target, because you can blame everything on it, and some of that will stick. But it also makes it unpopular for substantive reasons, in that people really hate the experience of interacting with it. You rarely get people who like Obamacare; its supporters, at best, think it's less bad than what was there previously. I follow the area pretty closely, am quite left-wing politically, clearly think it's better than the alternative, and nonetheless when I was signing up for a marketplace plan last year, even I found the experience frustrating and complicated. You need to understand a pretty big range of things to just understand the baseline terminology and market setup: the subtleties of in-and out-of-network coverage (did you know that in-network hospitals can have out-of-network doctors?), the different kinds of deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, the subsidy schemes, etc. Then you have to learn how to read the policy documents of each plan in light of this new terminology you've learned, and compare them in order to act as an informed market participant. The healthcare.gov marketplace gives a few tools to try to simplify comparisons, but the overall experience is still overwhelming, and I'm not even sure whether I made a good choice in the end. I think there's a good argument that simpler, universal programs are actually an easier sell. Centrist Democrats view policy-wonk type programs as "more moderate", because they contain various means-testing and market mechanisms, and believe this will make them an easier sell than universalist entitlements, which are seen as too left-wing. But I'm not sure that's actually true, if you take into account that people really fucking hate policy wonks and their programs, while universalist entitlements like Social Security and Medicare are popular. Frank Pasquale makes that argument at a bit more length here, arguing that of the two early 20th century traditions that the Democrats to some extent inherit, populism and progressivism, they've erred too much in the direction of the latter, promoting "technocratic alliance between corporate and government experts". https://balkin.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/rebuilding-health-care-policy-from.html https://balkin.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/rebuilding-health-care...