{"id":1400,"date":"2009-12-11T12:49:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T16:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/12\/11\/do-americans-really-want-healthcare-reform-its-complicated\/"},"modified":"2009-12-11T12:49:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T16:49:00","slug":"do-americans-really-want-healthcare-reform-its-complicated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/12\/11\/do-americans-really-want-healthcare-reform-its-complicated\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Americans really want healthcare reform? It&#8217;s complicated."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/northcountrypublicradio.org\/blogs\/ballotbox\/uploaded_images\/poll-787608.png\"><img style=\"margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt;float: left;cursor: pointer;width: 320px;height: 221px\" src=\"http:\/\/northcountrypublicradio.org\/blogs\/ballotbox\/uploaded_images\/poll-787606.png\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><br \/>A lot of media &#8212; including NPR &#8212; have adopted the meme lately that health care reform now being contemplated is unpopular with most Americans.<\/p>\n<p>Polls like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/2009\/12\/10\/fox-news-poll-percent-prefer-congress-health-care\/\">this one, from Fox<\/a>, suggest that over half of us actually prefer that Congress just drop the whole affair.<\/p>\n<p>But Nate Silver, the left-leaning number-cruncher whose site has become must-read stuff for political wonks, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fivethirtyeight.com\/2009\/12\/in-polls-much-opposition-to-health-care.html\">has an interesting new take<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>He points out that much of the &#8220;opposition&#8221; to healthcare reform comes from people who think the current Democratic proposal doesn&#8217;t go far enough.<\/p>\n<p>He compiled this graphic (see above) to illustrate the range of views Americans have on reform.<\/p>\n<p>There are plenty of polls to pull from, but my gut (I know, I&#8217;m in Stephen Colbert territory here) tells me this is about right.<\/p>\n<p>What it doesn&#8217;t read &#8212; and this is the politically telling part &#8212; is how passionate people are about their views.<\/p>\n<p>My guess is that most of the people who support this proposal (that 31% chunk) do so fairly unenthusiastically.  It&#8217;s sort of, &#8216;If this is the best we can do, fine.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Whereas the 35% who oppose the Democratic plan are far more vehement.<\/p>\n<p>Silver concludes (and again, I agree) that the White House and Democrats have done an awful job selling their version of reform. <\/p>\n<p>A fact which may come back to haunt them as this comes up for a vote, and again in 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of media &#8212; including NPR &#8212; have adopted the meme lately that health [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}