Health Care Polls Reflect Opposition and Confusion

WASHINGTON (Dec. 21) -- The polls are clear: A majority of Americans don't like the health care ideas proposed by Democrats in Congress.

Now, if only they knew what those ideas were.

The Pew Research Center reports that 69 percent say health reform is hard to understand.

"It's a very complicated set of propositions for people to make judgments about because there's a fair amount of misinformation," said Pew Center President Andrew Kohut. "Even the policy wonks have trouble with this stuff."

It is tough to keep up with a 2,000-page bill that lawmakers have tried to change with amendments that themselves run into the hundreds of pages. Especially when senators cast crucial votes in the dead of night in the middle of a blizzard and the holiday season.

Back in July, before lawmakers turned their full attention to health care, a Gallup poll found two in three doubted members of Congress had a good understanding of the issue. Nearly half, however, said they had the issue figured out. Still, the majority admitted they did not have a good grasp of the details.

Top presidential adviser David Axelrod appeared confident Sunday on ABC's "Good Morning America" that, "reality, I think, will trump poll numbers in the dead of winter as this debate is going on."

Axelrod and other Democrats got some good news Monday in a strategy memo by Mark Mellman that said opponents to their bill include many who think it doesn't go far enough.

Still, Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup, said it could take months and more likely years for that reality to sink in and for Americans to really know how they like the changes being made to their health care.

"The White House is sensitive to the fact they're doing something against the majority's will," he said. "They're saying that as time goes on, people will appreciate it is the right thing to do, which is basically saying, 'We know more than the public.' And that gets into another philosophical debate – whether Congress should lead or reflect the public will."

Theodore Marmor, a public policy professor at Yale University's School of Management who helped create Medicare for seniors in the 1960s, said polls on health care are meaningless because most of the public doesn't understand the issue. "Principled congressional actors will discount polls that have almost nothing to do with the facts of the legislation," he said. "Opinions have been shaped by sound bites, distortions, misrepresentations and in some cases outright lies."

Or, just as likely, by political affiliation. Newport and other pollsters note a sharp partisan divide when it comes to health care. In the latest Gallup survey, more than three in four Democrats support the Senate bill, while 83 percent of Republicans oppose it. Independents are more evenly split, with 49 percent opposed and 44 percent in favor.

Democratic leaders "know it's not popular with the general public but it is popular with Democrats," said Harvard health policy professor Robert Blendon. "If they fail to get a bill enacted, it will ... show they are incapable of leading the country" when they control both the White House and Congress.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz said voters understand all too well the debate under way on Capitol Hill and will make their opinions clear in the 2010 elections. "Americans want health care reform, but not this health care reform," he said.

As the Senate prepares for a final vote on Christmas Eve, Luntz predicts the legislation will get the votes it needs "regardless of what the public thinks."

"On health care, we're not on the 1-yard line but we are on the 20-yard line, and it's close enough that Obama can kick a field goal."