Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
(Susan Walsh/AP)Photos (1 of 1)
Public likes public option for healthcare. Joe Lieberman doesn’t.
Poll results tend to show that voters approve of the public option for healthcare. But senators like Joe Lieberman could vote the other way.
By Peter Grier | Staff writer/ October 27, 2009 edition
Reporter Peter Grier talks with CSMonitor.com's Pat Murphy about the public option for healthcare reform and whether it could be part of the final bill.
Reporter Peter Grier
The public generally supports the public option. This may be one big reason that Senate majority leader Harry Reid surprised many in Washington by including a proposal for government-run insurance – also known as the “public option” – in the Senate’s version of healthcare reform legislation.
“All the national polls show a wide majority of Americans support the public option,” Senator Reid said on Monday.
Whether the public option can make it to the Senate floor, however, remains an open question. On Tuesday, some key Senate moderates said they still opposed a government-run insurance plan. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I) of Connecticut said he would support a GOP filibuster of a healthcare bill if it contained a public-option provision.
Poll results tend to back up Reid’s assertion that voters approve the public option. In an Oct. 21 Gallup survey, for instance, 50 percent of respondents thought a healthcare bill should include a public, government-run insurance plan. Forty-six percent thought it should not.
But as that poll also shows, the margin in favor of the public option can be smaller than Reid asserted. Opinions on the topic are not strongly held and could be changed, some polling experts say.
“Whichever side – the proponents or opponents – gets their message to break through and become the real perception of Americans, that is who is going to win the public opinion on this topic, given how soft and malleable public opinion is,” said Mollyann Brodie, director of public opinion at the Kaiser Family Foundation, at a seminar in Washington last Friday.
On Tuesday, Washington was still grappling with the aftermath of Reid’s announcement that the Senate bill would include a public option, albeit one that contains a clause allowing states to opt out. For weeks, many pundits had predicted the public option’s demise, since it is opposed by moderate Democrats who are crucial to the future of the healthcare reform legislation.
Some of those moderates were saying they remain concerned. Senator Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said that he would vote against the bill if it contains a public-option provision, even one with an opt-out escape hatch.
Another key moderate, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) of Louisiana, said in a statement that she was still “very skeptical” about a government-run insurance plan and that she was still working with Reid to find a “principled compromise.”
In addition, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D) of Arkansas said that she was studying the details of the plan and that her vote was dependent on how it would affect her state.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) of Maine, the only Republican in Congress who has voted for any of the early Democratic versions of healthcare reform, said Tuesday that she would vote with Republicans to block the version outlined by Reid.
Surveying public opinion of the public option, a New England Journal of Medicine article earlier this year co-authored by Harvard health-policy professor Robert Blendon found it mixed. “Introduction of a public plan as a competitor is supported in most polls, but respondents vary in their beliefs about how such a plan should function,” said the article.
Yet some recent polls have shown strong support. In an Oct. 20 ABC News/Washington Post survey, 57 percent of respondents were in favor of government establishing a health plan to compete with private insurers.
Some analysts have criticized this survey, saying it did not make clear that the government would actually run the plan. If that information is added, support diminishes, they claim.
“I would argue that there is no public opinion on the public option. You can move the public-opinion needle significantly with changes in wording or emphasis,” said Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute, at the Oct. 23 Kaiser Family Foundation seminar on health reform and polls.
But Ms. Brodie of Kaiser said that in their polls, they have tried a number of different wordings, and while support varies, it still exists.
“No matter how we ask it, we get a majority supporting it in one way or another,” she said.
• Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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Enough votes?
For more on the reemergence of the public option yesterday, click here.
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Comments
2. Michael | 10.27.09
From your article:
“Whichever side – the proponents or opponents – gets their message to break through and become the real perception of Americans, that is who is going to win the public opinion on this topic, given how soft and malleable public opinion is,” said Mollyann Brodie
From your headline:
Public likes public option for healthcare.
Trying to help the proponents get their message to break through? (cause that’s what it looks like to me)
3. Tarrop | 10.27.09
While you are throwing around poll data, you might want to add some data that comes from sources that are not notoriously bent to the left. Rasmussen, for instance. I would suspect that the truth is that there are just as many people that are opposed to the public option as people that are in favor. That is NOT a majority. Those in favor of this policy are being fairly short sighted; No one will reap any advantage from this policy for several years. The way the economy is going, the people who are now (or will be) in dire economic straights will have already been to hell and back before they will see any benefit. By then, our country will also be bankrupt.
4. russ miller | 10.27.09
The public supports the public option????? Every poll I’ve seen says they do NOT support the public option. You base your headline on Senator Reid’s quote I presume. Same on you! Do your research and report the facts. I expect this type of journalism from the Wash. Post or the NY Times; I expected better from you.
5. Small Business Owner | 10.27.09
My company’s health care insurance renewal went up in August by a whopping 21% year over year. What other non-monopolized industry can claim this kind of pricing power during the worst recession in 50 years!!
Most people who don’t see the health insurance bills simply don’t get it. The fact is the median family income is around $50k, and the health insurance premium for small business for a family is around $17k. You do the math and try to explain why one third of a family’s income is going to health insurance, and that’s today, before the 20% increase again next year.
As a small business owner, it’s clear to me, the most risky action is no action. Many of the developed world live with public healthcare at half of our cost, and their people live longer and have fewer infant deaths. The time is ripe for public option!!
6. BillMmelb | 10.27.09
I wonder what people would say about private insurers.
For example what if you asked, “would you be willing to pay twenty percent more for your medicare coverage to have a private insurance company administer it, if you received no additional benefits, and your policy could be cancelled when you try to use it?”
Surely 100% of the public would say ‘no’.
A lot depends upon all the assumptions we make. I doubt though that, minus the false assumptions, anyone would pick our system over those of other countries that have public systems. Our present system could not even compete with the VA system or medicare. So the only hope of the private insurance industry is to maintain the current confusion and illusions among the electorate.
7. Jason Stone | 10.27.09
Perhaps the Monitor could do an assessment of health care systems in other countries.
For example, Australia has a healthy private health insurance sector which competes with a sustainable public health care system. Everyone is covered (despite age or income), and everyone supports the system through either private insurance premiums or taxation.
It’s not perfect (no medical care system ever will be), but it seems much more equitable, economical and sustainable than the US system.
European countries, Canada, and many other places also have good systems - and the world didn’t end despite “big government”’s involvement.
The US debate seems fairly insular when considered in isolation to other first world practice. Americans are unnecessarily denying themselves the benefits of a good system - why???!
Perhaps the retirement/pension/unemployment system could also be reviewed for similar reasons…
8. AJ | 10.27.09
The 60 Minutes story on 10/25/09 about how Medicare is scammed out of millions should make us think twice about applying this system more broadly in our nation. If this passes without correcting the problems of fraud in the system first, it will be just as bad as the rush to the Bailout. Bail me out.
9. Sue Wills | 10.27.09
Thank you Joe, Olympia, Lamar, Kit and various other Senators who are willing to vote their conscience on health care insurance. If polls were to substitute “government-run insurance” for “public option healthcare,” it could be argued that the polls would be overwhelming in favor of not pursuing a government plan. Or, put another way, instead of talking poll figures, let’s talk real figures like the billions required to run such an “option.” Ask John Q. Public how much he’ll “like” increased taxes for healthcare and as well as green energy, which the President ear-marked billions for today. At a time when taxpayers have already spent billions bailing out Wall Street, the auto industry, and banks to name just a few, surely common sense dictates that citizens reconsider this gambit called government-run healthcare.
10. John Seaberry | 10.27.09
I believe that the millions of people without heath coverage are in need of a public option. Tax credits will not help those who currently have no income or job. I think that a lot of members in congress do not realize that people are dying because of lack of health care. I currently have a full time job and can’t afford coverage for my family because of high deductables and extremely high premiums. If the Goverment will put a income limit on the public option, the private insurance company’s would’nt have to worry about losing a lot of their business, especially since the public option would be for very low or no income.
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1. Jim Church | 10.27.09
As Joe Conason pointed out in a column in July 2006:
“Sen. Lieberman has long been known to cultivate the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, which provide jobs in his home state and contributions to his campaign fund. But he has literally been sleeping with one of their Washington representatives ever since his wife, Hadassah, joined Hill & Knowlton last year. The legendary lobbying and PR firm hired her as a “senior counselor” in its “health and pharmaceuticals practice.”