Check out these polling numbers on health care reform.
"From everything you have heard or read so far, do you favor or oppose Barack Obama's plan to reform health care?" If favor or oppose: "Do you favor/oppose that plan strongly or only moderately?" | ||||||
. | ||||||
| Favor Strongly | Favor Moderately | Oppose Moderately | Oppose Strongly | Unsure | ||
| % | % | % | % | % | ||
7/31 - 8/3/09 | 23 | 27 | 12 | 33 | 5 | |
Look at that! Only 12% "oppose moderately" but 33% oppose strongly. That's where these angry mobs are coming from. That one third on the far right is number you see on a variety of issues that reflects the hard core of the Republican party by the way. Obama's approval ratings reflect a similar number. 34% are have unfavorable opinions of him.
These people are angry about a lot of things. Health care reform is just what gets them fired up this summer. These are the same people who are absolutely convinced that Obama wasn't born in the United States but that John McCain was.
The angry mobs are hoping that if they yell loud enough at enough public political events, their local representatives will get scared and oppose health care reform. I just hope that the representatives in question do their own polling to confirm what the level and intensity of opposition really is.
UPDATE: To compare the nature of this opposition to health care reform look at these numbers on Sarah Palin. About 32% have a positive opinion of her. Dick Cheney's numbers are similar. So are the numbers about expelling illegal immigrants. Of course, I'm cherry picking here. But I don't think this is a complete coincidence. There is a hard core of about 25-35% of voters who are on the political right of every dimension they are confronted with. These people are the true conservative "movementarians."
14 comments:
Liberals put up with Bush for eight years but conservatives cannot even handle Obama for eight months. What a bunch of cowards.
That old scare tactic machine is well oiled and working again...I remember when this first started, 72% of folks wanted health care reform...now they think it is single payer, euthanasia driven plan...amazing the ignorance of people in the information age and all of the dis-information that gets through...the results of deregulated capitalism. . WW
What I find annoying is that much of the opposition seems to be focussed among the elderly white population. A population that currently already gets a tax payer funded, single payer plan (Medicare).
But really, this opposition is ideological. On issue after issue, I see about a third of the respondents taking really far right positions. I don't think this is a coincidence. It's the same people.
18% of US folks think the sun revolves around the earth...maybe Sarah Palin is their leader...but I'm off point...I think you are right RBR...it looks like the same people and so many are staged and just out right lie about who they are at the town hall meetings. It is amazing that they are against it and yet, they do not want their Medicare or Social Security taken away from them...it is a strange mutation of the entitlement mentality. In a way, isn't funding for the F-22 socialism?...yet that is okay if federal funds go to a program that produces killing machines instead of helping sick people...this is scary to me. WW
Yes, WW, the nature of this ideology that seems so dominant in the Republican party has evolved from the Reaganite conservatism which was at least a recognizable version of the typical range of opinion in a democracy to something more akin to Latin American or Hispano-Italian fascism. The combination of religious fundamentalism, nationalism, statism and militarism is really scary.
That 33% "oppose strongly" is just that the core GOP base has been fired up on this issue. That is why it is exactly the same % as the Obama unpopular numbers.
Sadly, the GOP is lying to its base, telling them that they are opposing Canadian-style "socialized medicine" or a "government takeover." If only that were on the table so I could approve of it! Sadly, they are negotiating a namby-pamby program with no government takeover and no single payer, leaving us at the mercy of these nasty private insurance companies who take all of our money and use it for the perverse purpose of denying us the care we paid for.
Note that some on the LEFT, like me, are disgruntled with the current shape of health care reform because it's NOT going to be single-payer. Not sure how that fits in the numbers, but it probably is the reason why "favor moderately" is bigger than "oppose moderately." I might answer "favor moderately" at this point, and it would not be an indicator that I'm a centrist.
Good point about these surveys. You can't really place these on a single dimension with strongly in favor on one end and strongly oppose on the other.
I'm increasingly becoming a fan of "mixed" systems like they have in Europe (but not Canada). Canada has no "private option" if you will.
My ideal situation would one where there is a publicly funded program for the provision of basic health care with the possibility of people paying out of pocket for private supplementary insurance if they want to go beyond that.
France has the #1 rated health care system and it is a hybrid or as you say, mixed or blended system. the French have addressed the root of the system, how docs are educated
and trained and the legal system. The French system is also not inexpensive. At $3,500 per capita it is one of the most costly in Europe, yet that is still far less than the $6,100 per person in the United States.
That's because the French share Americans' distaste for restrictions on patient choice and they insist on autonomous private practitioners rather than a British-style national health service, which the French dismiss as "socialized medicine." Virtually all physicians in France participate in the nation's public health insurance, Sécurité Sociale.
Their freedoms of diagnosis and therapy are protected in ways that would make their managed-care-controlled US counterparts envious. However, the average American physician earns more than five times the average US wage while the average French physician makes only about two times the average earnings of his or her compatriots. But the lower income of French physicians is allayed by two factors. Practice liability is greatly diminished by a tort-averse legal system, and medical schools, although extremely competitive to enter, are tuition-free. Thus, French physicians enter their careers with little if any debt and pay much lower malpractice insurance premiums. WW
One of the things that annoys me about the themes in this debate is that Republicans rarely if ever differentiate between Canadian, British, French, Japanese or German health care programs. They are all just "socialized medicine" and then criticized with frightening anecdotes about denied care - mostly from Canada.
Yes, it is infuriating...it is so effective and easy to play to the emotions of the uniformed or ignorant...the flat out lies about it are dumbfounding...makes me wonder, if no body reported these lies, would they get traction?...what happened to journalism?
Journalism wasn't pretty enough on camera so they hired good looking people regardless of whether they were smart. Then they trained them (like training seals) to read provocative rhetorical questions off of teleprompters.
It doesn't help that journalism programs don't require much in the way of substantive cross-disciplinary training. They make sure to teach their students how to write (sort of) and how to present stories but not necessarily how to do research in the fields about which they will report (politics, economics, health policy etc).
Style over substance.
Right, now I remember, Megan McCain has a degree in journalism from Columbia...we're srewed.
WW
When I was in college the requirement to become a high school teacher was to have a BA in some some substantive discipline (like math or history or english or whatever you were going to teach) and a minor in education.
It seems to me that journalism should have a similar standard. But instead if you have a degree in journalism with little if any background in any thing else, you are considered qualified to do research in just about anything. That doesn't seem to be a situation that will produce a lot of well trained investigative journalists.
When you add the superficial emphasis on appearance that TV brings and you get what we have now.
We should think about the heyday of journalism in the late 20th century when most newspapers were close to local monopolies and there were only a few news outlets. In this context, journalism schools promoted all sorts of integrity and relative lack of competition made it profitable to pursue it. In fact, the profitability came from having to service many ideological and partisan bents with press outlets that eschewed a lot of poliitcs. We all got a bit spoiled with journalistic ethics and fact-checking. Now we're headed back to the early 20th century period where freelance radio and newspapers were legion, and most were deliberately partisan.
Caveat lector, as I like to say.
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