WSJ/NBC Poll: Support Soft For Health Care Reform Details

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll came out yesterday, allegedly gauging all sorts of things abotu what Americans think about President Barack Obama and his policies to date. The results aren't especially encouraing for the President's attempts to reform health care, even more so because the poll was completed days before discouraging new details came out about how many people health care reform would actually cover.

"On health care, the public remains open to persuasion. Without being told anything specific about the Obama plan in the survey, about a third of people said it's a good idea, about a third said it's a bad idea and the rest had no opinion. When given several details of his approach, 55% said they favored it, versus 35% who were opposed.

"There was also support for the Democratic push to let people sign up for a public health-care plan that would compete with private companies, one of the toughest issues in the health-care debate. Three in four people said a public plan is extremely or quite important. But when told the arguments for and against the plan, a smaller portion, 47%, agreed with arguments in support of the plan, with 42% agreeing with the arguments against it.

"At the same time, nearly half the participants said it was very or somewhat likely that their employer would drop private coverage if a public plan were available.

"As for how to pay for the package, estimated at more than $1 trillion over 10 years, the public favors proposals to require all Americans to get insurance, to raise taxes on the rich and, to a lesser extent, to require all but the smallest businesses to offer insurance or pay into a fund.

"But majorities oppose plans to tax health benefits, even if the taxes only apply to particularly generous plans. The public is divided about cuts to Medicare."

Extract from all of that what you will.

My own view is that support for health care reform wanes once people learn the details and that does not bode well for broad public support for the "plan"--whatever that plan might actually be. The other thing worth reemphasizing is that this poll was finished two day before the Congressional Budget Office reported that the Senate's Kennedy-Dodd plan, considered the main Obama-backed health plan, would only provide coverage to another 16 million Americans at a cost of $100 billion a year, leaving another 30-plus million Americans without insurance. It will be interesting to see how health care reform pans out in future polls.

It's also deeply troubling that about half of respondents said their employer would cut their health coverage and kick them onto the public plan, if such a plan passed. That would create a budgetary catastrophe. As I've noted before, it is essential that President Obama address this kind of possibility in some fashion, especially if he wants to beat back conservatives who claim he's trying to engineer a government takeover of health care.

Anyway, let's look at an example of how the plan pencils out. At $100 billion a year for 16 million people, that works out to $6,250 a year in insurance cost for each newly covered person or $520.83 a month. Not to be too much of a skeptic, but that strikes me as a very costly plan per person. Right now, I can go out and purchase health insurance coverage for myself through Group Health Cooperative (the big HMO in Washington State) for about $225 a month. The deductible stinks of course, but that's well under half the cost of the Senate plan (according to the CBO's number crunchers) and so this makes me wonder what gives exactly.

Interestingly, a few years ago I know that the COBRA payment for King County (Seattle area) employees was a little over $500 a month for one person and that the coverage was gold-plated: small co-pays for office visits and prescriptions and pretty much everything else covered to a great extent. I'm not saying the proposed Kennedy-Dodd plan is the same thing, but that dollar amount sure does make me wonder.

I'd like to see health care reform pan out (hell, I've been uninsured for two years), but it's beginning to sound, absent a miracle, as if the plan is DOA.