http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/8141"ralphbon September 14th, 2009 at 5:03 pm 25OK
...here is the precise wording of the survey questions. This is not given in the NPR article or even in the main NEJM report; you have to go to the report’s supplemental online appendix to find it:
Respondents were asked to indicate which of three options they would most strongly support:
1. Public and Private Options: Provide people under age 65 the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans.
2. Private Options Only: Provide people with tax credits or low-income subsidies to buy private insurance coverage (without creating a public plan option).
3. Public Option Only: Eliminate private insurance and cover everyone in a single public plan like Medicare.
As is all too common, the description of the public option (bolded) is completely aspirational and bears no resemblance to the actual, hobbled program in HR 3200 and even less resemblance to the even more hobbled description of the public option given by Obama in his speech Wednesday. The notion that people under 65 would have a free choice of something like Medicare is as pie-in-the-sky in today’s Washington as full-frontal single payer. Even a single-payer nut like me would jump for joy and pound the pavement to preserve HR 3200 if that’s what it actually contained.
Oh, and while we’re at it, look at the wording of the single-payer choice. Eliminating all private insurance (even nonprofit Medigap-type plans of the sort available in France and most other nations providing universal health care) is a canard. Few knowledgeable single-payer proponents would consider this a necessary stipulation, and it is absolutely not a feature of HR 676, the single-payer bill most of us support. Other surveys showing much higher support for single payer, including that showing 59% support among US physicians, polled on a description of a Medicare-like program extended to all Americans. So it’s not surprising that only 10% of docs supported SP given this misleadingly radicalized description."