With one eye on his plummeting approval ratings, the president is dropping his support for a government-run insurance plan, AKA the “public option.” The White House says it wants to “synthesize and harmonize” and that it’s “going to approach [health-care reform] in a different way,” but it’s hard to see this as anything other than a significant retreat. The public option was once the core of the president’s health-care plan.
Obama’s base supporters are furious, not only because the public option is important to them, but also because they think the American people want it. At first glace, the polling data they cite seem to support this idea. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that these advocates have misread the polls.
It’s important to remember that while public polling can pick up on general attitudes (“Do you approve of the president?”), it is of limited use when it comes to specific policy issues. The more complex the policy involved, the less useful the poll is.
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And yet in June, the
New York Times set the tone for health-care-poll coverage with the headline “
In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health.” The poll found that 72 percent of respondents favored the public option. With every successive poll with a similar result, liberal outfits such as the Campaign for America’s Future have beat their chests with headlines such as “
New Poll Shows Tremendous Support for Public Health Care Option.” Recently, liberal
Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein urged Democratic lawmakers to “
Listen to the Polls” and wrote that opposition to a government-run health-care option is “
resolutely, aggressively, anti-democratic.” And just this past Friday, another
Washington Post blogger, Greg Sargent, ran a story called “
White House Polling Memo Omits Numbers Showing Support For Public Option.”
It’s rather hard to reconcile this interpretation of the polls with the political unpopularity of the Democrats’ handing of the issue. Rather than consider the data’s limitations, however, liberal health-care-reform advocates have reacted like
chimpanzees who’ve been shown simple conjuring tricks. It’s beyond their comprehension that they could be losing the debate.
The problem is that these polls ask the wrong thing. The relevant question is not, “Do you support the ‘public option’?” but rather, “What
is the ‘public option’?”
After months of fruitless White House and Democratic campaigning, a polling firm has finally done a rudimentary test of what the public knows about the health-reform debate. Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates released a poll last week that ought to undermine any confidence Democrats might have about enjoying a “mandate” for health reform. The survey of a thousand adults found that, given a choice of three plausible-sounding definitions, only 37 percent of the public could correctly identify what the “public option” is. “That’s nearly the equivalent probability that one would expect if everyone were just guessing,” according to the poll (a random pick between three options, of course, gives a 33 percent chance of success).
The Penn poll is not without its problems — for one thing, it’s an Internet poll, which isn’t nearly as reliable as a traditional poll. But even Nate Silver, a decidedly liberal-leaning pollster, observes that “this should serve as something of a reality check for people on both sides of the public option debate.” Silver further notes that ignorance on the topic is widespread; it persists regardless of party affiliation.
Silver still insists that reputable polls provide ample evidence that there is public support for a public insurance option. Specifically, Silver cites two polls — including
this Quinnipiac poll, which asked, “Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?” Sixty-two percent of respondents said they did support such a thing. (Though support was down seven points from the previous Quinnipiac survey a month prior.)
