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Nate Silver tweets:Make sure to check out the new Kaiser poll on health care. You’ll be shocked at how little people know about the bill.

Really? I doubt that. I have a dim view of human nature, so I already figure that most people don’t know squat about this stuff. Still, I guess you never know. Maybe 73% think that Obamacare mandates monthly applications to the government to justify your continued use of medical services after the age of 65. Or the construction of new Soylent Green factories in every state. So let’s grit our teeth and take a look. Here’s the chart:

Nate is right: I am shocked. But in the opposite direction. I’m surprised people know as much as they do. And the most important stuff — guaranteed issue, subsidies, individual mandate, Medicaid expansion, and funding sources — all score in the 60-70% range. Considering how complicated this stuff is, that’s not bad.

Still, it could be better. So what would it take to turn opponents into supporters? According to Kaiser, it would take wider knowledge of the following features: (1) Tax credits to small businesses, (2) Won’t change most people’s existing arrangements, (3) No federal money for abortion, (4) No federal money for illegal immigrants, (5) Health insurance exchange, and (6) Guaranteed issue. So that’s the stuff to talk up.

And the least popular feature? The individual mandate, by a landslide. It’s even less popular than the $900 billion cost, which is pretty remarkable. Unfortunately, the whole plan falls apart without a mandate, so there’s not much we can do about that. Just learn how to explain adverse selection to your relatives when you’re trying to sell them on the plan, OK?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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