More on Health Care Reform

Bechdolt (congrats on being the first commenter in the class, by the way) suggests that the polling results I referred to in the last post may be consistent, and suggests two ways the problems these polling results imply might be remedied. If I understand, the ideas are, essentially (a) make the health care reform proposals clearer to the US population to prevent mis-information, and (b) present a new plan that everyone agrees with.

Folks, speaking of mis-information, if I misrepresent your ideas here, please correct me in the comments--I'll do my best, but I might not get it right every time.

I want to push back on this comment a bit. I don't disagree that mis-information plays a large role in the health care debate, but I wonder if it's possible to have accurate and up-to-date information on the ongoing health care reform process out there, given that (a) nothing has been passed yet, and the bills in congress are in flux, and will be until a final bill is approved by both houses, (b) multiple proposals are being floated, and (c) nobody has an incentive to accurately describe the likely results of any legislative proposal.

Essentially, with respect to the third option, people who are in favor of a health care reform have an incentive to make it look better than it really is, and people who are against it have an incentive to make it look worse. This is a lot easier to do, given that we can't really anticipate with precision the exact results of any given reform. So it's easy to put forth a best-case or worst-case scenario and describe it as The Truth.

So who's going to put out accurate information about what the best-case outcome should be?

Polling 'n stuff

Apparently, my blog is starting to get somewhat more traffic, according to Google Analytics, probably due to its use in my class (PSCI 2101). Therefore, it's probably time to post something new that is (maybe) relevant to the policy analysis class.

I would like to point you all to the following link, which connects you up to public opinion polling feeds from pollster.com. This is a great source of polling information on just about everything in US politics. You can check out the web page, or you can sign on to the rss feeds and get all the polling data (from just about everyone reputable in the country) delivered to your rss aggregator.

One interesting thing of note here is just how wacky public opinion polling results have been over the last couple of months in the area of health care reform. Among other interesting things, public opinion in favor of changing the current system is pretty strong, but public opinion against many of the alternatives is also very high. Maybe this is the result of all the mis-information going around. Or maybe not.

Mostly, the point is that recent public opinion polls don't seem (to me or to many analysts) to be wholly consistent. Or are they?