A July poll from Rasmussen reports finds that 58 percent of Americans surveyed say that the health care reform passed by Congress and signed by the president in March 2010 should be repealed. Just 37 percent oppose a repeal; a plurality (44 percent) think that repeal of the bill “would be good for the economy.” Unsurprisingly, positions on health care are heavily influenced by partisanship, with Democrats being dramatically more supportive of the bill and Republicans more likely to be opposed. Fifty-three percent of Americans say that the “health care plan is bad for the country,” with 34 percent saying it is “good for the country.”

 

Conservatives reading the results of the Rasmussen poll will no doubt cite is as evidence that the majority of Americans oppose “socialized” health care, as pursued under the Obama administration, and “progressive” reform more generally in pursuit of leftist policy goals. What these conclusions miss is the basic fact that Obama’s health care reform was not socialist in any sense. In fact, the plan keeps private hospitals, doctor networks, pharmaceutical groups, and insurance companies in tact – the major reason why the plan was supported by private health care companies and practitioners as a “boon” for the industry. The exchanges created by the Democratic plan are merely conglomerations of private insurance providers, which are now required to provide health insurance for all – but will continue to do so for profit.

 

To get to the reality of why Americans oppose the health care reform, one needs to look at additional polling data. CBS polling from December 2009 found that a strong majority of Americans – 59 percent, supported “the government offering some people who are uninsured the choice of a government administered health insurance plan – also known as a ‘public option’ – that would compete with private health insurance plans.”  Support for strengthening the government role in health care has been longstanding. Prior to the onset of the massive business funded, Republican led propaganda campaign against health care reform (framing government involvement in health care as inevitably causing “rationing,” “costing” too much, and leading to “socialism”), ABC/Washington Post polling from as early as 2003 found that 62 percent of Americans favored “a universal health insurance program, in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that’s run by the government and financed by taxpayers.” Conversely, just 33 percent supported “the current health insurance system in the United States, in which people get their health insurance form private employers, but some people have no insurance.”

 

Public opinion surveys find that socialized health care programs are tremendously popular when framed in accordance with currently existing socialized programs such as Medicare. Kaiser polling from October 2009 found that 62 percent of Americans favored “the government offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan – something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get – that would compete with private health insurance plans.” In short, people like the idea of having a public plan that will compete with private companies, and prevent them from charging exhorbitant prices or excluding customers based upon “pre-existing conditions.” One wouldn’t know any of this, however, from looking at claims from Tea Partiers, conservatives, and right-wing media pundits who speak of the public as if it is opposed to socialized care. 

 

A logical reading of the polling data above suggests one of two possibilities. Either one, the public is opposed to reform because it has been manipulated by conservatives into opposing the Democratic health care bill, while not knowing what’s really in it. This possibility seems likely in that a strong majority of Americans, when asked, indicated support for major provisions of the Democratic bill, including the expansion of Medicare, the taxing of wealthier Americans to pay for reform, and the prohibition on excluding patients from coverage based upon “pre-existing conditions.”

 

A second possibility is that the public is skeptical of the Democrats’ health care reform because it does not go far enough in providing for those without health care. Public institutions that would provide health care for the disadvantaged without profit motive were deliberately left out of the reform efforts. It appears that the public responded critically to the corporate funded-Republican (and conservative Democratic) effort to derail partial socialization of health care. NBC/Wall Street Journal polling from October 2009 found that 75 percent of Americans blamed “special interest groups such as big pharmaceutical and health insurance companies…for making health care reform legislation so difficult to deal with and pass,” compared to just 20 percent who blamed these interests “very little” or “none at all.”

 

In short, the American public appears very unhappy about the stifling of real health care reform at the hands of privileged private actors who had a vested interest in blunting reform in the name of continued profits. This reality should be kept in mind whenever one hears others claiming that Obama “has gone too far” in pushing socialized medicine and that the public simply “isn’t going to take it any more.”

 

Anthony DiMaggio is the editor of media-ocracy (www.media-ocracy.com), a daily online magazine devoted to the study of media, public opinion, and current events.  He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North Central College, and is the author of When Media Goes to War (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He can be reached at: [email protected]

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