Federal Judiciary

Public Ignorance on the Public Option -- By: Mark Hemingway

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.

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 an 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.)

But looking at the rest of the poll, once again we see that public attitudes about the proposed health reforms are deeply confused. Pluralities think the Obama health reforms would hurt the quality of care, hurt the economy, and increase their personal health-care costs. Solid majorities 1) think Obama?s health reforms would increase taxes; 2) oppose the part of plan that would make insurance mandatory and fine those who did not have it; and 3) say they would prefer to have private insurance over government insurance. That last result is telling, considering that the major argument against a subsidized government insurance plan is that it would put private insurers out of business. Again, ignorance of the issues might go a long way toward explaining polling results that are seemingly at odds.

The problem of ignorance in health-reform polling should have been obvious from the very beginning. It?s as if the media and Democratic politicians spent the last few months conspiring to convince themselves they already had public support for health reform, when the public in fact needed not only convincing, but also informing. Back in June when the New York Times trumpeted ?Wide Support for Government-Run Health? in its headline, buried in the article was the concession, ?it is not clear how fully the public understands the complexities of the government plan proposal, and the poll results indicate that those who said they were following the debate were somewhat less supportive.? There?s a case to be made that the reason the White House health-care agenda has tanked in the polls over the last two months is that the public has actually become more informed about what those reforms are. 

Maybe, as Nate Silver argues, there is still some polling evidence to suggest that Americans do think the public option is a good idea. But that evidence is much weaker than many advocates seem to think, and this misconception has led them to engage in some very bad politics.

-- Mark Heminway is an NRO staff reporter.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on September 08, 2009 (boomark / email).