Public Option: Who knows it? Who wants it?
Drives me nuts each time I hear "the people demand a public option"
Regular readers may recall my lament that despite the many, many times pollsters have asked Americans to react to descriptions of the so-called "public option" in health care reform, very few have attempted to probe the depth of Americans' knowledge about the proposal.
The point of debate is often whether Americans "want" a public option. These arguments sometimes get expressed in the context of representative democracy. "65% of Americans are begging Congress for an inclusive public option," wrote one Daily Kos diarist a few weeks ago, yet "our Representatives in the Senate are REFUSING to give The People what they overwhelmingly want." Poll questions like the one cited by the diarist typically measure how Americans react to a brief description of the Public Option concept. Those are helpful, but if Americans are really "begging" for a public option, we might also want to measure how many know what the public option is before hearing the pollster's description.
Unless I've missed it, the only effort to tackle this question was an opt-in internet panel survey sponsored by AARP (an organization that has not taken a formal position on the public option) and conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. They found that only 37% of their adult sample could correctly identify the Public Option from a list of three possible choices. As Nate Silver pointed out, if the respondents had picked randomly, a third (33%) would have chosen correctly.
Don't get me wrong. I favor a public option of some kind. But supporters are only fooling themselves with such talk.
Daily Kos is not the most likely source of cogent analysis on health care, because the editors are maniacally committed to defending an HR 3200 style public option at the expense of actual systemic change. You're right in a narrow sense about the public option, and indeed it is difficult to imagine the public having much idea what it is given the immense amount of misinformation on the subject. But you should not underestimate public support for the basic goal of equitable health care reform, and the public option is a way towards that, as more serious proposals like Medicare for All are also. People almost certainly understand the latter concept more.
October 14, 2009 9:36 PM | Reply | Permalink