ObamaCare "Debate" update

Kraughammer: On Nancy Pelosi’s shifting statements on including a public option in health-care legislation:

It’s a perfect example of the incoherence on the Democrats on all of this. And she is reflecting the president's incoherence.

On the one hand — here we are eight months into this administration, three months into a really active, vigorous debate on health care, and two days before the president's great speech — nobody has any idea what's in it, and even he probably doesn't.

So, on the one hand he's saying we're in a crisis and we have to act and it has to be done by last August, and then he doesn't even know as of today what it is, and he's asking immediate action on something that he doesn't even know about. That's number one.

But secondly, underlying all this is unease about his intentions. Obama is a man who believes in the government-run [single-payer] system. He has said that several years ago. He has now disavowed it. But clearly people understand that the public option is a way to achieve, ultimately, a government-run system…a single-payer system. But he can't admit it, because in America it is not going to happen. He himself has said that tactically you can't be in favor of a single-payer system.

He also says he will never talk about rationing. But he has said it in public, and he has said it in interviews, and he says it in private [that he is] troubled about the hip replacement his grandmother had when she was very sick and ill and terminal. He clearly thinks about rationing. He thinks it's important, but, again, he can't say it.


Public Ignorance on the Public Option [Mark Hemingway]
One of the things that's been baffling about the health-care debate is how the president and Democrats' approval has been plummeting — and specifically due to their handling of the health-care issue. Despite this, liberal health-care advocates have been trumpeting polls that show wide support for the most controversial aspect of the plan, the government-run "public option."

I have a piece up on the home page where I unpack this mystery a bit:

In June, the New York Times set the tone for health-care-poll coverage with the headline “In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health.” The poll found that 72 percent of respondents favored the public option.

With every successive poll with a similar result, liberal outfits such as the Campaign for America’s Future have beat their chests with headlines such as “New Poll Shows Tremendous Support for Public Health Care Option.” Recently, liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein urged Democratic lawmakers to “Listen to the Polls” and wrote that opposition to a government-run health-care option is “resolutely, aggressively, anti-democratic.” And just this past Friday, another Washington Post blogger, Greg Sargent, ran a story called “White House Polling Memo Omits Numbers Showing Support For Public Option.”

It’s rather hard to reconcile this interpretation of the polls with the political unpopularity of the Democrats’ handing of the issue. Rather than consider the data’s limitations, however, liberal health-care-reform advocates have reacted like chimpanzees who’ve been shown simple conjuring tricks. It’s beyond their comprehension that they could be losing the debate.

The problem is that these polls ask the wrong thing. The relevant question is not, “Do you support the ‘public option’?” but rather, “What is the ‘public option’?”

After months of fruitless White House and Democratic campaigning, a polling firm has finally done a rudimentary test of what the public knows about the health-reform debate. Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates released a poll last week that ought to undermine any confidence Democrats might have about enjoying a “mandate” for health reform. The survey of a thousand adults found that, given a choice of three plausible-sounding definitions, only 37 percent of the public could correctly identify what the “public option” is. “That’s nearly the equivalent probability that one would expect if everyone were just guessing,” according to the poll (a random pick between three options, of course, gives a 33 percent chance of success).
09/08 11:43 AMShare