Snapshot of Attitudes toward Health-Insurance Reform

Last week the Associated Press reported a survey about Americans’ attitudes toward the health-insurance reform law.

• 37% of likely voters said they want to “repeal it completely”—presumably taking back the $200 each Medicare recipient was paid this year, ending the requirement that insurers cover people’s children in their early twenties, reopening the “donut hole” in Medicare drug reimbursements, and so on. That’s what “completely” means.
• 36% of likely voters “want to revise the law so it does more to change the health care system.” The difference is within the poll’s margin of error of 4.4%.
• 15% “would leave the overhaul as it is.”
• 10% want “to narrow its scope” in unspecified ways.

Adding up the people who support the law and the people who want the federal government to do more about health care comes to 52%, against 47% who want to narrow or repeal the law.

Yet the same survey found: “Among likely voters, 52 percent oppose the legislation, compared with 41 percent who said they support it.” So attitudes aren’t really adding up.

(The survey “involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,501 adults nationwide, including 846 adults classified as likely to vote in the November congressional elections.”)

The least popular part of the law is apparently still the mandate for individuals to have health insurance of some sort. That provision was of course introduced into the bill to gain the support of health-insurance companies. Do people really think that a Republican congress, elected with big corporate money, would repeal that first?