Plan B Forum

I was perusing some of the latest polls a couple of days ago, (yes, I have scintillating hobbies...) and I came across something that I think really illustrates well a point I've made previously...

About how the wording of poll questions, asking essentially the same question, can produce vastly divergent results...(I've pointed out that the best example we have of this are poll questions about abortion)

What I found particularly interesting about this, is that the vastly divergent results come from the exact same poll, polling the exact same people...

These are taken from a recent Rasmussen Poll about Obamacare...

You can look at all the questions and the results here:

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... h_care_law

Here are the two I found fascinating, (I'm easily fascinated...)

Thirty-six percent (36%) of all voters still believe the government should require every health insurance plan to cover the exact same set of procedures, showing no change from a month ago. But 40% now oppose this government requirement, up from 33% in early October and the highest level measured to date. Twenty-five percent (25%) are undecided.

Seventy-eight percent (78%) believe individuals should have the right to choose between different types of health insurance plans, including some that cost more and cover just about all medical procedures and some that cost less while covering only major medical procedures. That’s the highest level of support for this choice to date. Just eight percent (8%) disagree, with another 13% who are not sure.

This is essentially the same question, asked two different ways:

"Should there be a uniform standard for health insurance policies, or not?"

So what accounts for the enormous difference in responses?

I puzzled over this for a little while and now, (as I so often do) I have a theory that I believe could explain it...

The first question, talks about what "the government should require" and the second talks about "the right to choose"...

As a society, we have a cultural and historical aversion to "government requirements" that still exists, (though it has gone down somewhat over the past 100 years) but we still have an even more deeply engrained cultural and historical embrace of the "right to choose"...

That explains how you could have poll results splitting almost evenly when asking a question in terms of "government requirements" while having an overwhelming majority on one side when phrasing essentially the same question in terms of "right to choose"...




There may be a better answer, but that's my theory, and I'm stickin' to it...

On the tangent of government policy, the older I get, the more convinced that government "comprehensive" solutions (e.g., to health care, immigration) are always horrible cluster fuck's, laden with more pork and stupidity than productive innovation.

I have believed for a long time that a couple simple, painless Government initiatives could have brought about significant improvements in health care/insurance decades ago, if Congress had had the balls to do it. (1) Standardize coverage options, and (2) allow health insurance companies to operate nationwide. Neither of these two initiatives is controversial (for the public, at least), and both would have been beneficial and cost next to nothing.