CNN asked a stupid question and got a stupid result:
From everything you have heard or read so far, do you favor or oppose Barack Obama's plan to reform health care?OK, so in fact there's nothing stupid about the question at all. The public's response, likewise, is perfectly reasonable given the information they were provided.
51% Favor, 45% Oppose
But a better question might be: what exactly is Barack Obama's health care plan? Does he have one?
And if so, what's included in it? Is it the plan Obama advanced on the campaign trail, which had a public option but lacked an individual mandate? Is it the one making its way through the Senate Finance Committee, which has an individual mandate but lacks a public option? Is it the House's version, which has both?
And how is the plan going to be paid for -- something the campaign version of Obama's plan was largely silent on? Is there going to be a tax on health care benefits -- an economically sound but undoubtedly unpopular idea that Obama explicitly campaigned against? Booze and cigarette taxes? A rollback of the Bush tax cuts? A value-added tax?
CNN's article makes a big deal of the "public option" component of Obama's "plan". The article seems to imply that it's the public option that accounts for its tepid numbers, when in fact, the public option is the one component that seems to be somewhat unambiguously popular.
The more pressing issue, though, may be that the lack of detail and public-facing leadership from the Administration on health care. You'd think that if you took two fairly popular things -- health care reform and Obama -- and combined them together, you'd wind up with a more popular thing. Instead, we have a situation where the Obama "plan" is less popular than the idea of health care reform in general and less popular than Obama in general. Obama's approval ratings on health care, indeed, lag about 10 points behind his overall numbers, according to an average of three recent polls:
The conservative spin on this is Obama's personality is preferred to his liberal politics. That might be true, but it's not clear that conservatives are the only problem Obama has on health care. Quinnipiac actually tracks presidential approval by political philosophy (liberal, moderate, conservative). Although Obama is underperforming on health care among all groups, the differences are larger among moderates and liberals than they are among conservatives:
That's not to suggest that Obama should throw caution to the wind and push for single payer. But he needs to begin pushing for something, and something fairly specific.
41 comments
Amen Mr. Silver;
I voted for Obama because he was supposed to have the sack to thwart politics as usual. I'm ready for a single payer, pseudo-single payer, or something in between, but for Chrissakes, do something already!
Hopefully I voted for a true progressive; I'm starting to have my doubts.
I couldn't care less about what's in the plan as long as it has a strong Public Plan option.If it does,everything else will gradually be superseded by a universal single-payer system.
If the plan passed by Congress does not contain a strong Public Plan option,I hope Obama has the guts to veto it.
Nate-
You should probably check out the senior numbers in the internals for all of these polls. They like what they have (Medicare) and don't see any need for great change. When it comes to details, i suspect some seniors might be a hidden opposition.
I really hope progress is made with today's town hall. I will be all ears. If you're going to be at work during the town hall, the app I always use on my iPhone for White House updates will be streaming it, so you can listen to it conveniently here: www.iheartradio.com/whblive. Hoping for the best today.
I agree that Obama needs to define "his" health plan. We already know that this is the GOP's M.O. - define the term and seize the initiative. I warned a goodly time back that the term "public option" needed to be defined by the Democrats before the Republicans defined it for them. Unfortunately, the opportunity is beginning to slip away.
President Obama needs to step in NOW and regain the high ground by grinding it into people's consciousness why a public option is essential to forcing the hand of private insurers.
I agree that Obama needs to define "his" health plan. We already know that this is the GOP's M.O. - define the term and seize the initiative. I warned a goodly time back that the term "public option" needed to be defined by the Democrats before the Republicans defined it for them. Unfortunately, the opportunity is beginning to slip away.
President Obama needs to step in NOW and regain the high ground by grinding it into people's consciousness why a public option is essential to forcing the hand of private insurers.
What impresses me about Obama is his pragmatism. By staying largly above the details, and showing his willingness to be flexible about his campaign promises, he keeps his eyes on the prize: getting something passed that improves this mess.
Each of the options being considered has the potential to mobilize opposition in huge ways. By remaining aloof, he is able to let Congress work out the details, and prospectively take the heat.
By the way, who cares if you're the first, second, or twenty-seventh comment. I sure don't.
I agree that Obama needs to define "his" health plan. We already know that this is the GOP's M.O. - define the term and seize the initiative. I warned a goodly time back that the term "public option" needed to be defined by the Democrats before the Republicans defined it for them. Unfortunately, the opportunity is beginning to slip away.
President Obama needs to step in NOW and regain the high ground by grinding it into people's consciousness why a public option is essential to forcing the hand of private insurers.
Monthly senate rankings!!!
Thanks for posting this Nate.
I think this proves two points I have been trying to make.
The country is very split on healthcare reform
The devil is in the details
Interesting on the stats (and to show depending on your view you come to different conclsions.) I fcoused on the disapprove numbers. (If you extrapolate those numbers should be bigger becuase you have higher undecideds) For liberals and conservatives its a wash and he gets a +14 for disapporve on independents. For me thats where the rub is.
So to me the question becomes what is the best tact for getting those moderates back.
Looking forward to a mature discussion
More Americans See Democratic Party as “Too Liberal”
http://tinyurl.com/n7t4hu
A Gallup Poll finds a statistically significant increase since last year in the percentage of Americans who describe the Democratic Party's views as being "too liberal," from 39% to 46%. This is the largest percentage saying so since November 1994, after the party's losses in that year's midterm elections.
This secular trend coupled with increasing unpopularity of Obama’s policies bodes ill for the fortunes of Democrats over the next few years.
The President’s ambitious legislative agenda has unmasked him and his party as very much ideologically left of the American people. That is a hard place to win elections from.
Worse, as today’s job figures show, job losses continue to exceed expectations, making the public as well as the investment community increasingly nervous about the prospects for recovery.
An anemic, jobless recovery as we are likely to get from an Obama program that is 100% focused on the government’s role and spares nothing for the private sector, will surely add to the people’s impetus to change course in 2010 and likely once more in 2012 – unless Obama can learn to govern from the center and not from the hard left.
I doubt Obama can.
He is the most left wing ideological president in our history. He sees himself on a mission.
What he may not realize is that it is a mission of personal destruction.
petekent01 (on twitter)
If I has a plan, I hope he starts selling it soon!
Too bad the issue is now framed as "public option" instead of health insurance company monopoly.
It is a shame that we are still having this discussion. This should be a thing of the past. America is regressings. Darn republicans are taking us back to the stone age
Obama seems fairly intimidated by the Dem caucus in Congress. Although he repeatedly has made remarks about what he wants to be in the healthcare solution, he has studiously avoided announcing the possibility of a veto if it does not meet his criteria.
So far, he has been all bark and no bite. If he doesn't realize that he owns whatever Congress dreams up, and if it isn't going to work, then he owns that failure whether it matches what he asked for or not.. then he's much less intelligent than we've been led to believe.
The part I love about 'post approval' is seeing the multitude of 'First!' postings by people who didn't know there was a delay in commenting.
In the town hall meetings Obama seems to be starting to push more specific components of health care reform, i.e. the public option. There was also interesting talk of getting the 60 democratic senators to vote for cloture (preventing a filibuster). Even if they can't get the 60 votes for a public option, this would in affect allow it to pass anyway. It seems like Obama should forcefully articulate a plan soon, but is now really the best moment?
I agree that Obama needs to start doing more / pushing for something.
Although I don't think a health care plan has to be more expensive. We could do all sorts of things to make health care cheaper - pass a law saying drug prices can't not be significantly more in the US than other western countries - let people with low chances of having a normal life again just die - focus on preventitive care - adjust insurance plans so people with health metrics (wight blood pressure etc) pay much less since they cost much less - import doctors from other countries... etc.
Change is needed, but there's no need to assume the change should cost more - there are many ways we could make healthcare cost less.
First?
Disapporve, eh?
In any case, I agree with you. Where IS Obama anyway? We haven't really seen him on internal policiy since the stym. Sure, he spoke on international issues, but he's leaving the democratic party mostly alone for domestic issues.
watched Obama's town hall today, and he seemed lost when trying to explain his plan in detail. he actually did a better job of explaining *McCain's* campaign plan, and why he opposed it.
he's either going to need to explain his vision better, or get a new vision. he's been able to refine his message to gain support in the past, such as on the stimulus where he rallied public support.
he needs to do at least as good a job with explaining healthcare, but hasn't yet.
Nate: I hope you're reading the comments on the previous post. You may want to start fact-checking your guest bloggers.
July Senate Rankings, Nate?
The CNN poll seems like a trick question. As far as I know, Obama doesn't even HAVE a healthcare plan.
And whatever he talked about during the campaign was just that - talk. Until Obama puts his backing behind a specific plan, I have no idea what "his" plan even is.
Dear Nate:
What might be so much more interesting that this article, is to create a nearest neighbor analysis with the Senator's voting patterns as well as contributions received by health care industry (insurers, doctors, trial lawyers). see e.g., http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=7823194
Then deduce from the key health care players, where the fault lines are and identify the swing senators.
To do have a rant (even if probably correct), we can find anywhere. Interspersing some meaningless numbers for meaningless polls, doesn't cut it.
And what the people "think" doesn't really matter. This is not an election, it's sausage making involving a known frame in the Senate: 100 Senators.
Some real inside baseball "strategery" (figuratively and literally) would be so much more interesting.
"Disapporve"
Great job, Nate! Is that actually the wording of the question or did you extrapolate it from the text? I ask because the article on CNN is really unclear if the question was related to Obama's "health care plan" or Obama's "health care proposals" as a more nebulous set of ideas.
Either way, I'm with you that the people polled seem to have a fairly loose grasp on the actual substance of the proposals, which is pretty clearly at least partly the administration's fault. I think the new Quinnipiac numbers you linked to illustrate that pretty clearly - although the trend common to both polls seems to be that people aren't inclined to spend (much) more money on health care. Guess it's that old belt-tightening going on again...
Nate…
I think the only thing this proves is the inherent unreliability of polls. Sometimes it’s deliberate (Rasmussen) sometimes accidental, but since there are more and more polling outfits publishing more and more data all the time, and no universally approved quality standard for them, the relevancy and newsworthiness of even the best are rapidly diminishing.
These days poll takers frequently cook up polls merely to return results that can be splashed across the media, which means their name gets in the papers even though no reliable information does.
I see we’ve now got a moderator again. Too bad such is necessary, but it is a relief not to have to put up with the wackos, for the moment at least.
dednea: When apnea turns really ugly...
Poor Nate. Obama is a consensus builder and that is exactly why he is doing so well in the Middle East and at home. He is a huge lefty at heart, but he is much more concerned about not becoming Hillary II!
Better post idea for you - study the monopolies on medical insurance in most states and dis-prove the Republican meme instead of attacking someone on your side...
Before Copernicus, people generally believed the sun revolved around the earth, but as we got more data it became increasing hard to reconcile this basic idea with the observed facts. People thought up the Ptolemaic system in which the heavenly bodies didn't just revolve around the earth, but they revolved in small circles called epicycles as they went around the earth. That eventually turned out not to be sufficient, so they hypothesized epicycles within the epicycles.
That's what we are doing today with health care reform. We want a "uniquely American solution." So we have weak plans, strong plans, coops, exchanges, individual coverage, community ratings, etc., etc., etc. I still haven't seen we are going to handle the problem of people with pre-existing conditions. If we cover them, people will take out minimal insurance until they get sick and then switch. We need some more epicycles.
If Copernicus were alive today, I am sure he would say, "If you simply give everyone Medicare, you wouldn't need all this complication, and I'll bet it would be cheaper, too."
Wonderful shout-out to Nate's articles about the public plan in today's NYT small business blog by Robb Mandelbaum.
@Bradford
While I agree that a good deep look into the medial monopolies in this country would be a good thing, I certainly don't think that a solid analysis of Obama and the Democratic congress's actions should be considered either unnecessary or considered an "attack."
If we don't monitor the people in charge, we get shtty government. Just ask the R's.
lensch…
Bingo.
Fixing the currently health insurance system would be like propping up the old Ottoman Empire. There’s nothing really left to prop up, it’s all patches and fixes and a mare’s nest of rules, regulations and restrictions that are completely unnecessary.
Single-payer will win out in the end, but unless Max Baucus is called to his maker before the end of summer getting the public option through the Senate will be a nasty, bruising fight.
@PK
What you conveniently forgot to mention is that, in that same poll, about the same percentage of Americans view the Republican party as "too conservative" (43%), and a plurality of Americans say that the Democrats' views are "about right" (42%, compared to 34% for Republicans). If you can draw some logical conclusions from those tea leaves, more power to you, but it just looks like the same ideological static to me.
A lot of people seem fixated on how are we going to pay for health care reform. Judging by the reactions in Congress and within the punditocracy, that could be a deal breaker.
Really? Did anyone had such reservations when it was time to finance two wars at the same time?
I rest my case.
@ PeteKent -- you're preaching to the choir, as usual. Regarding this:
http://tinyurl.com/n7t4hu
a) the trendline for Dems as "too liberal" is essentially flat from 1996 to 2008, with an uptick just this year.
b) the same graph for Republicans is, unsurprisingly, even less favorable in every respect. So while the electorate seems to be souring a little on Dems, the GOP is outright toxic (as many candid GOPers will admit).
Never say never, but I don't see any reason for a GOP resurgence anytime soon, unless the country totally tanks and Obama is blamed. What's sad -- make that insane -- is that some GOPsters are so unpatriotic they'd LOVE to see some horrible disaster happen, like massive economic collapse, or even a nuke from Al Qaeda, as some idiot recently said. Maybe Obama won't get blamed, but he might, and that's reason enough to hope for the worst! Because then we might get someone like Palin in there who'd make Dumb-ya look as clever as his dad.
Keep hope alive, bro!
Good posting, Nate. Obama hasn't given anyone anything on health care yet. I'm thinking this is a game of chicken in which he wants to hold back until competing ideas have been shot down.
Of course, there is also the issue of chickenshit Democrats, i.e., the bulk of the party that remains scared of its collective shadow and of Rupert Murdoch.
We do need single payer, and Obama's soft touch just got the AMA to switch and become for it, he is playing this perfectly, IMO.
THANK YOU NATE
I saw this yesterday and it bothered me to no end. I have never hated CNN so much.
You're pretty perceptive, Nate.
I saw this idiotic poll in my beloved Boston Globe this morning. Blech. And I would've missed it had I neglected to read your post about it yesterday.
Let's add this to the long list of reasons CNN is a terrible news source:
Legitimizing intellectually unsubstantiated debates
Failure to fact-check the quotes and claims made on-air
Substituting idiotic twitter ramblings and entertainment personalities for sober, serious, thoughtful journalism
...
Today Dave Reichert (Wa-8 R) came out in favor of a public option.
Figures like this explain why Obama is taking to the street on health care.
Much of the negative perception about public health care is based on negative media, rather than negative views about what public health care is actually like.
We can say this because, in countries that actually have public health care, support for the system is in the mid to high 80s.
So, you're right. Obama will have to get specific, even if it means giving the conservatives a clearer target.
By being specific, what he _removes_ are the straw men conservatives have been attacking for years now.
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