Two-thirds of Americans support Medicare-for-all (#1 of 6) - Kip Sullivan

[slipslidingaway]

http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/12/06/two-thirds-support-1/

Two-thirds of Americans support Medicare-for-all (#1 of 6)

Introduction to a Six-part Series
By Kip Sullivan, JD

“Americans are scared to death of single payer.”

These words were not uttered by some foaming-at-the mouth wingnut. They were written by Bernie Horn, a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, a member of Health Care for America Now, on June 8, 2009. Horn explained that he was moved to write this tripe because single-payer supporters were asking why Democrats had taken single-payer off the table to make room for the “public option”

....

Horn went on to assert that single-payer had been taken off the table because Americans want it off the table. He claimed polling data supported him, but he cited no particular poll. The truth is that the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) and other groups in Health Care for America Now (HCAN) had decided years earlier they would push Democratic candidates and officeholders to substitute the “option” for single-payer, and they would tell both Democrats and progressive activists that Americans “like the insurance they have” and that Americans oppose single-payer.

The argument that single-payer is “politically infeasible” is not new. That argument is as old as the modern single-payer movement (which emerged in the late 1980s). It is an argument made exclusively by Democrats who don’t want to support single-payer legislation – a group Merton Bernstein and Ted Marmor have called “yes buts.”

The traditional version of the “yes but” excuse has been that the insurance industry is too powerful to beat or, more simply, that “there just aren’t 60 votes in the Senate for single-payer.” But the leaders of the “option” movement felt they needed a more persuasive version of the traditional “yes but” excuse. The version they invented was much more insidious. They decided to say that American “values,” not American insurance companies, are the major impediment to single-payer..."

[leftstreet]

1. K&R

[enlightenment]

2. Thank you for posting this.

Looking forward to the remaining sections!

[valerief]

3. They lie, we die. nt

[havocmom]

4. Winger brother doesn't support it; say's he is against it as it is socialism

and might lessen the amount of funds Medicare has to keep paying for his heart surgeries and stents.

:grr:

[BrklynLiberal]

6. and he has no clue about the incredible irony of that statement.....

[havocmom]

10. None what so ever.

But he has finally got it through his head that crap RW email forwards will buy him an assload of trouble and sound, fact-based argument from his baby sister.

[BrklynLiberal]

13. Good for you!!

:thumbsup: :hi:

[havocmom]

15. Once I started hitting 'Reply All' he really got antsy and grumbled a lot.

Finally, he wised up and keeps that crap in the chorus. He needed to be made to understand that not all America lovin people agreed with Rush and Glen.

[BrklynLiberal]

16. LOL. That is exactly how I got a few people to stop sending me that crap.

"REPLY ALL" is a real weapon. LOL

[dflprincess]

5. Single payer is “politically infeasible”

when the only ones who get to vote on it (and so have the only opinions that count) have sold themselves to the insurance industry.

PNHP are right, it's time to scrap the scams Congress has come up with and start over again with a plan to extend Medicare.

[Echo In Light]

7. K&R

[ipaint]

8. Thank you. n/t

[BrklynLiberal]

9. That is the program that should have been introduced in the first place...

perhaps by President Obama. It is so obvious, and the infrastructure is already in place. It could become effective almost immediately.

Just add to the FICA deductions, and everyone is covered....

Much too straightforward, and no one will make any money from it..

[Echo In Light]

11. Re this thread in particular, would be interesting to be able to read the # of unrecs

[chill_wind]

12. K & R. But if we learned anything from the bailout politics

of more than a year ago, it doesn't matter what the American people want.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laland/2008/09/la-timesbloombe.html

[jtrockville]

14. Single-payer Medicare4All is the only real solution.

Anything else just divides up the giveaways among the industries, and leaves us paying top dollar for health care that may or may not be granted to us.

[slipslidingaway]

17. Thanks for the comments and the recs :))) n/t

[Soylent Brice]

18. K&R

[slipslidingaway]

19. “American Values” — A Smoke Screen in the Debate on Health Care Reform

http://healthcarereform.nejm.org/?p=1245

"Amid all the rhetoric about health care reform, one claim has emerged as a trump card designed to preserve the current patchwork of private and public insurance and to stop discussion of a government-sponsored single-payer system in its tracks: the claim that single-payer health care — a Canadian-style Medicare-for-all system — is antithetical to “American values.” The idea that American values dictate a particular approach to health care reform is often stated explicitly, and it is implicit in the generalization that “Americans want” a particular system. The underlying premise is that an identifiable set of American values point incontrovertibly to a health care system anchored by the private insurance industry. Remarkably, this premise has received very little scrutiny.

Two related assumptions are buried in the language of “American values.” The first is that there are archetypical Americans — that if we know someone fits the category “American,” it should be possible to predict his or her general worldview accurately. However, we have good reason to doubt that assumption. In nearly all respects — ethnically, culturally, religiously, politically, and socioeconomically — Americans are increasingly diverse. The recent presidential campaign provides evidence that a monolithic conception of what it means to be “American” is problematic and outdated: those who championed the idea of “real” Americans (as distinct from Americans who are somehow less representative of American ideals) were precisely those whose candidate lost the election.


Suppose that “freedom to choose” is indeed the paramount American value relevant to health care. For many people, it would surely imply choice of physician, hospital, or clinic. For such choice, a single-payer system beats the competition hands down. Incremental reforms preserving the private insurance industry and employer-based insurance would probably perpetuate the restricted choice of health care providers that many Americans already encounter: private plans typically limit access to certain physicians or hospitals, and physicians often refuse to accept certain plans. In contrast, single-payer proposals eliminate those restrictions.

...In their book Benchmarks of Fairness for Health Care Reform, Norman Daniels and colleagues reject these “ungenerous” views of our values, arguing that past failures to reform health care are better explained by the influence of interest groups whose wealth and power are threatened by reform.5 The authors propose that fair equality of opportunity is a more promising and relevant American value. Opinion polls support this proposal: in multiple surveys of randomly selected Americans during the past decade, more than 60% of respondents have favored government-guaranteed health care for all. Although these responses don’t necessarily specify a single-payer system as the only model for government-guaranteed insurance, they surely do not exclude it.

Policymakers debating health care reform should stop hiding behind the smoke screen of “American values.” Discussions dominated by references to uniquely American individualism, uniquely American solutions, or narrowly defined conceptions of choice tell us more about the political and economic interests of the discussants than about the interests of the Americans they claim to represent. In an increasingly diverse country that has a widening gap between rich and poor, a more promising approach is to start with the questions that matter to everyone: Will the system care for us when we’re sick and help prevent illness when we’re well? Will we have access to medical care throughout our lives without risking financial ruin? Will we be able to navigate the system easily, without jumping through unnecessary hoops or encountering excessive red tape? Will health care spending be managed wisely? Health care reformers owe Americans a system that best addresses these questions — not one that merely pays lip service to ill-defined “American values.”


Originally posted in this thread...

Uniquely American Solution - What is it ? Why is it being pushed?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6289091&mesg_id=6289091

[MannyGoldstein]

20. Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck

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[slipslidingaway]

21. Great summary :) and thanks for expressing my feelings as well. n/t

[andym]

22. It's a very interesting article that shows 2 things

1) When people really know about single payer they like it (see the section about the Jefferson Center study)

2) Support for single-payer is very soft (see quotes below). The article argues that it is due to polling methodology, but I suspect it is because many people are not well informed and are easily manipulated by the media.

From the OP's article:
"Now consider the June 12-16, 2009 CBS poll which asked: “Do you think the government would do a better or worse job than private insurance companies in providing medical coverage?” Fifty percent said “the government” would do a better job versus 34 percent who said “the government” would do a worse job.

Now, just to raise your skepticism about polls another notch, consider this wrinkle. When CBS asked the same question two months later – during August 27-31, 2009 – they found 13 to 14 percent of respondents had changed their minds in favor of the insurance industry. That is, by late August (by which time dozens of tumultuous “town hall” meetings about the Democrats’ health care “reform” legislation had taken place), the percent who thought “the government” would do a better job had fallen to 36 (from 50 percent) while the percent who thought “the government” would do a worse job had risen to 47 (from 34 percent)."
--------------

My conclusion is that there needs to a bottom up effort to get the facts out and prevent the anti-government, anti-tax sentiment from washing out the groundswell.

[slipslidingaway]

23. Thanks for your observations which I agree with, when people find ...

out more they are inclined to support the system. The problem does appear to be that too often those advocating for such a system are not heard.

FWIW I found another transcript of the Jefferson Study which is not in pdf format.

Full text of "Single-payer health care systems : issues and options : hearing before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, first session, on to provide for a state administered single-payer health care system in the United States, focusing on access to quality health care and cost control issues, October 19, 1993"

http://www.archive.org/stream/singlepayerhealt00unit/singlepayerhealt00unit_djvu.txt


On the polling question I believe both factors contribute to the results, lack of information by those being polled and also how the questions are asked. If you think back to the polls on the public option which showed strong support, these were done after a vigorous campaign to associate the public option with Medicare. The results were then repeated by many politicians and news reports.


http://journals.democraticunderground.com/slipslidingaway/80

The Power of the Word Medicare -

Posted by slipslidingaway in General Discussion
Fri Aug 21st 2009, 07:23 PM

When the word Medicare is used in the various polls, the number of people who favor the plan automatically jumps, it makes no difference if the question relates to the public option or a national insurance system such as single-payer...the word "Medicare" has a favorable connotation.

The Kaiser Health Tracking poll is one of the few recent polls that asks about a single-payer plan or government run insurance plan for all, many of the polls leave SP out altogether and that includes the widely cited poll from June saying that 72% of people want a public option.

What Kaiser did, at times, was half sample certain questions.

For instance if they were sampling 1200 people, they would ask about a public plan "like Medicare" to only half of the people. The other half they would leave out the word "Medicare" and the support for a public plan, or single-payer, would drop.

Back in July their poll showed a jump in support for SP and I posted about it below, when there was a half sample I used the highest number, regardless of whether or not it was about a public option or SP.

Now their August poll has just been released and they did not half sample the public option or single-payer questions, what they did do is include the word "Medicare" when asking about the public option and exclude it from the question about single-payer, guess what happened to the single-payer poll...it dropped.

[waterscalm]

24. I have never trusted Health Care for America Now group.

[slipslidingaway]

26. HCAN was just formed in 2008 and yet the became the dominant ...

group pushing the public option.

:shrug:

[waterscalm]

25. Senate Dems May Open Up Medicare To Pacify Progressives=Huff post..

I doubt it will happen. they are talking of people buying into Medicare. Its not just lowering the age.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/senate-dems-may-open-up-m_n_382728.html


Senate Dems May Open Up Medicare To Pacify Progressives



First Posted: 12- 7-09 12:37 PM | Updated: 12- 7-09 04:06 PM

[slipslidingaway]

27. But this would leave all the healthier individuals paying premiums to private...

insurance companies???

[waterscalm]

30. It is suppose to be affordable but I doubt it unless it is subsidized

greatly. Healthier???????

[slipslidingaway]

31. I mean under 55 younger and generally healthier :) We'll see what they...

finally agree upon with respect to opening up Medicare ... if anything.

:)

[followthemoney]

28. If only we lived in a democracy the majority of the people

would not be dismissed as a marginal faction easily ignored.

[slipslidingaway]

32. True :( n/t

[Better Believe It]

29. K & R

[slipslidingaway]

33. Thanks and part 2 is up on the PNHP site. n/t