Is Health Care Reform Popular?

Insuring Resources Commentary:

So what do the polls, and the American public actually think about health care reform?

Is it Needed? What do people think?

Overall health care reform itself IS unpopular as the overall poll shows, BUT...
41% favor
51% oppose

Unpopular, right? Not quite...

81% support for a "new insurance marketplace -- the Exchange -- that allows people without health insurance to compare plans and buy insurance at competitive rates."
67% agree with ending discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions."
80% said insurance companies should be required to sell coverage to people regardless of preexisting conditions; 67 percent said so "strongly."
56% of those surveyed would be more likely to back a reform package that reduced "the federal deficit by at least $132 billion over 10 years."
68% favor closing the Medicare prescription drug 'donut hole' coverage gap."
56% said they back a requirement "for all Americans to have health insurance, either from their employer or from another source
72% support for requiring businesses to offer private health insurance for their full-time employees.
60% support raising taxes on higher-income individuals to pay for health-care reform
(couples making more than $250,000)
56% of Americans said they would be more apt to back a plan that allowed "children to stay on their parents' insurance plans through age 25."

Popular!

Looking at the specific issues INSIDE health care reform... they are very POPULAR.

According to the article below in the Washington Post, it depends on how close we're paying attention. For those who are paying attention its very popular. For those that don't analyze it, which is the vast majority of us, we don't get it and therefore oppose it. Its pretty simple.
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Is health-care reform popular?
by Ezra Klein
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/is_health-care_reform_popular.html

It's pretty common for Republicans to say that health-care reform is wildly unpopular. It's not even untrue. But nor is it true, exactly. Rather, it depends on the numbers you look at, and how you interpret those numbers.

I want to show you two graphs charting the popularity of health-care reform. The first summarizes the Republican position. It's a chart from Pollster.com tallying surveys asking whether you support or oppose the health-care reform bill.

Health-care reform is unpopular. But if you actually tell people what's in the health-care reform bill, then it becomes quite popular. A recent Newsweek poll found the same thing: "The majority of Americans are opposed to President Obama's health-care reform plan — until they learn the details."

You can spin this information in a lot of different directions: The GOP has mounted a huge disinformation campaign. People are stupid. The polls are biased in one direction or another. The media covers conflict and ignores substance. Pick your favorite.

Here's how I understand this information: Voters don't pay very close attention to politics, and they pay even less attention to policy. Making the problem worse, the outlets that should inform them don't actually do so: The news focuses on conflict and points of interest, and also what's changing each day, which is, almost by definition, not the most popular parts of the bill. And don't just blame the media for that: It's what audiences want.

Another important contributor to voter opinions is their perception of the political process. If all Democrats and all Republicans harmoniously agreed on a piece of legislation, well, it's probably a pretty good piece of legislation, right? But if the process is relentlessly angry and partisan, there's more natural mistrust of the product. This would be fine if it was actually an accurate way of assessing the content of legislation, but it's really not. It's an accurate way of figuring out whether the opposition party is interested in winning the next election.

They also take their cues from politicians. This is similarly useless. As a thought experiment, imagine that George W. Bush, who proposed the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, had also proposed this health-care reform bill. It's actually pretty plausible: The two had fairly similar structures. But in that scenario, many Republicans would have supported the legislation as an effort to bring free market principles to universal health care, and many Democrats would have opposed it.