Most People Support the Health Care Bill Once They Learn What's In It

Go figure. For all the political posturing around health care reform (to be fair and balanced, we'll also call it "Obamacare"), most Americans still don't know what's actually in the bill. A recent survey shows that when told what the bill proposes to do, significantly more people are on board with reform.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows that just 42 percent of Americans say they support current health care reform efforts. But when people were told that small businesses could get tax credits to help offset the cost of insuring their employees, 73 percent were more supportive. How about health insurance exchanges? Sixty-seven percent. And the fact that people with pre-existing conditions could no longer be denied coverage? That brought the level of support up to 63 percent. Sixty percent of those polled support closing the waiting period in which seniors on Medicare have to pay full price for their medication. Fifty-five percent liked the idea that no federal money would go to funding abortions.

On the flip side, there were provisions that turned off even the people who called themselves supporters. Sixty-two percent of people polled said they'd be less likely to support the bill if it requires all Americans to have coverage (I wonder how many of these people are currently uninsured). When told that the bill will cost approximately $870 billion over 10 years, 51 percent said they were less likely to get behind it.

The lessons here are twofold: 1) Americans aren't being given or seeking out the information they need to make informed decisions about legislation that could have a huge impact on their lives, and 2) laws are about compromise. We learned as children that nobody gets what they want all the time, right? So we shouldn't expect Congress to put out a bill that all Americans (or even Republicans and Democrats) can agree on. The bottom line, however, is that 17 of the 27 factors of the bill that people were asked about in the poll made them more likely to support it.

Photo credit: chris5aw