Different Angles of Healthcare Polling

One of the most interesting things about the healthcare polling is the different aspects of the reform that the public is polled on. While many polls look at the popularity of the health care proposals, others look at different factors of the reform

For example, a Rasmussen poll from August 19 looks at how the support for the reform changes if the public option is not a part of the bill. According to the study, only 34% of Americans support the bill if it is does not include a public option. This is compared to the 57% of Americans who oppose the plan if it does not have the public option.

The numbers go further than this. The poll looks at the intensity of the issue, which is also telling. Nine percent of America strongly favors the plan without the public option, while 44% are strongly opposed to it.

Additionally, only 50% of Democrats support the reform without a public option. A week earlier, 69% of Democrats had said they were in favor of the bill without the public option, showing its slipping popularity.

I thought that this was an interesting study. While President Obama has said that healthcare reform will be passed this year, this shows that most Americans don't just want any reform passed. They want the right reform passed, and according to this poll, having the public option makes for the right kind of reform.

Healthcare Reform Approval

According to a Rasmussen telephone poll from August 11, only 42% of Americans approve of the proposed health care reform. The telling factor is that this is down five percentage points from the same poll that was conducted just two weeks earlier.

Intensity, something that we touched on in class, plays an important role in the study. 44% of Americans strongly oppose the reform, compared to 26% Americans who strongly favor the reform.

Another interesting tidbit from the poll is that more Republicans disapprove of the plan than Democrats approve of it. Only 69% of Dems approve of the plan and a whopping 79% of Republicans support it.

With the Democrat majority in Congress and the large divide on this issue, it will be very interesting to see what happens on this proposed bill over the following weeks and months.

Interesting Gallup Study

As anyone who has seen any bit of the news lately can tell, the current healthcare debate is drawn pretty strongly between party lines. However, a study I found recently on Gallup yielded some interesting results.

The study looks at which states currently have the best healthcare systems in place and which states have the worst healthcare coverage. Surprisingly, the states that have some of the best overall health care coverage are states that lean more to the left in elections. Minnesota, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and several other left-leaning states yield some of the best healthcare coverage and options in the nation.

On the other end of the spectrum, some of the states with the worst coverage are states that tend to go to Republicans during election cycles. Research has shown that states like Texas, Alaska, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi yield some of the worst healthcare coverage.

What does this study prove?

While there are different economic factors in play in this survey, like the fact that a lot of states on the positive list are some of the more wealthy states and some of the states on the other list are some of the poorer states, I think it is really interesting. It shows how partisan this whole healthcare debate has become. It looks as though if any reform does come, it will be a result of a partisan push, not about what really needs to get done.

Introduction

My name is Philip Lasseigne. I'm a senior majoring in both politics and journalism. I additionally work as an editor and columnist for the Daily Vidette.
For my project for POL 312, I will be using the issue of health care. While it may seem cliche to do because of all the current coverage and attention paid to it, I want to focus on it because I find all of its coverage fascinating. So many different polls find so many different results on the entire health care issue and I thought spending my semester looking into this would give me a lot of information and a lot of insight into the matter.