ClydeR
12-19-2016, 02:26 PM
There's a fascinating article in the NYT's Upshot about "loss aversion" and how it may impact the repeal of Obamacare..
Even so, a repeal would unleash the awesome power of loss aversion, among the more deeply rooted human tendencies known to behavioral scientists. Their consistent finding: The amount of effort people will expend to resist being stripped of something they already possess is significantly larger than the effort they will devote to acquiring something they don’t already have.
When the possession in question is an insignificant material object, such as a coffee mug, people must be offered roughly twice as much to part with it as they would have been willing to pay to acquire it initially. If the possession relates to health or safety, that ratio becomes drastically larger.
In one experiment, subjects who were asked to imagine having been exposed to a rare fatal disease — there was a 1 in 1,000 chance they had caught it — were willing to pay only $2,000 for the only available dose of the antidote. The same subjects said that, under the same conditions, they would pay roughly 250 times as much to avoid any exposure to the disease if there was no available antidote.
The asymmetry is striking, since in both cases, people would be buying a one-in-a-thousand chance at reducing their likelihood of death. The findings suggest that people would fight hundreds of times harder to retain the health benefits they currently possess than they would to acquire those same benefits if they lacked them.
More... (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/upshot/obamacare-donald-trump.html)
My instincts tell me that resistance to repeal will be light.
Even so, a repeal would unleash the awesome power of loss aversion, among the more deeply rooted human tendencies known to behavioral scientists. Their consistent finding: The amount of effort people will expend to resist being stripped of something they already possess is significantly larger than the effort they will devote to acquiring something they don’t already have.
When the possession in question is an insignificant material object, such as a coffee mug, people must be offered roughly twice as much to part with it as they would have been willing to pay to acquire it initially. If the possession relates to health or safety, that ratio becomes drastically larger.
In one experiment, subjects who were asked to imagine having been exposed to a rare fatal disease — there was a 1 in 1,000 chance they had caught it — were willing to pay only $2,000 for the only available dose of the antidote. The same subjects said that, under the same conditions, they would pay roughly 250 times as much to avoid any exposure to the disease if there was no available antidote.
The asymmetry is striking, since in both cases, people would be buying a one-in-a-thousand chance at reducing their likelihood of death. The findings suggest that people would fight hundreds of times harder to retain the health benefits they currently possess than they would to acquire those same benefits if they lacked them.
More... (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/upshot/obamacare-donald-trump.html)
My instincts tell me that resistance to repeal will be light.