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The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and MSNBC political analyst Charlie Cook debate the role of health care in the presidential race.

By M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com

Most social media users approve of the Supreme Court's health care ruling last week but believe it will help Republicans in the November election, according to msnbc.com's computer-assisted analysis of tens of thousands of posts on Twitter and Facebook.

The court upheld nearly all of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on a 5-4 vote Thursday. The consensus in news reports and among political pundits was that the ruling was a major victory for President Barack Obama.

But among people who use social networking sites, 56 percent of those who stated a clear opinion on the decision's political impact said they thought it was more likely to energize Republican voters in November. Forty-four percent said it was likely to be more helpful for Democrats.

(Msnbc.com analyzed 175,000 Twitter and Facebook posts mentioning the ruling from midday Thursday through midday Monday. The analysis uses a tool called ForSight, a data platform developed by Crimson Hexagon Inc., which is used by many media and research organizations to gauge public opinion in new media. Crimson Hexagon reports a 3-percentage-point margin of sampling error for this type of online sentiment analysis.)

Overall, 60 percent of online commenters approved of the decision, with many of them telling stories abouthow it would have an immediate impact on their families.

Supreme Court upholds health care law Health care ruling could leave poorest Americans at greatest risk

Writing on Facebook, Cathy Weller of Cocoa Beach, Fla., described herself as "a fiscal conservative, libertarian leaning, social progressive." She wrote of losing her health insurance when she lost her job and the difficulty she had insuring herself because of her pre-existing condition cancer:

All of a sudden I found myself researching health insurance options. Imagine my surprise to find there were none. None. Not a few expensive ones, but none. It didn't matter if I was willing to pay $10,000 a month for health insurance, it was just not available to me, anywhere for any amount of money. This was the first time I personally came up against the issue of health insurance availability having worked constantly up to that point and always having employer offered insurance.

Excerpt from:
Social media users see health care ruling as GOP boon