Polling Health Care Reform

An interesting graph that parses a recent Ipsos/McClatchy poll on health care reform via Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com. Money:

One way to look at this: 43 percent of people favor health care reform, whereas 38 percent oppose it (20 percent are undecided). But the actual plan under consideration gets numbers that are more or less the reverse of that -- 34 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed -- because a significant number of people think the plan doesn't go far enough.

Now, a lot of polls have shown that people favor the concept of health care reform, even if they don't support the actual plan under consideration. So that finding, taken unto itself, is not that noteworthy. But the conventional wisdom -- and certainly my assumption -- has been that people oppose the plan because it's too liberal. In fact, some of the opposition seems to stem from the fact that the plan is not liberal enough. This would help to explain, for example, why polls show majorities (sometimes fairly sizable ones) in favor of the public option, but also pluralities or majorities opposed to the overall plan.

My high school algebra teacher had a favorite mantra; "You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you cannot please all of the people all of the time."

I used to hate it when he would bust out that gem. However, I think that it has great relevance to this polling data.

There will always be folks in favor of reforming health care (or government, or taxes, et al). However, when a plan is offered to do just that, even those who are in favor of reform will find something (or many things) wrong with it. Not a surprise.

Want more? RSS FEED | TWITTER FEED | FACEBOOK | STORE | HOME