Data Note: Footing the Bill - Kaiser Family Foundation

Data Note: Footing the Bill - Kaiser Family Foundation:

"This brief data note looks at the raft of polls recently released on the public’s willingness to pay for an expansion of coverage to their fellow citizens. It compares and contrasts findings on Americans’ general inclinations on the topic, and also revisits recent findings on specific revenue raising proposals."

The file is here: Data Note (.pdf)

Kaiser does all of us a great service by doing the hard work of keeping track of and advancing our knowledgebase on health care, so my comments don't reflect on them, but...

Thanks for putting together the Data Note on polling.

I find it tremendously frustrating that the questions are asked by organizations in the manner that they are.

The question should never be "would you support raising taxes to cover the uninsured," the question should be, ""if your wages increased to reflect your employer no longer paying for your health insurance, would you be willing to pay more taxes to cover the uninsured" or, to those without insurance or buying their own, "if you could be covered by a national health insurance plan, would you be willing to pay higher taxes," or questions like that.

I note in your last section, you point to people believing that this could be done without spending any extra money. This is true, if we adopted a German style Social Health Insurance model or French style single payer model. So, these people are not being foolish, they perhaps just see the tremendous amount of waste in the system and know that if we did things efficiently we would not have to pay more (and I would add, we wouldn't have to pay more after we got through the transition period that would be required).

So I would like to see some organizations asking questions premised on wholesale reform - transformation to a German or French model - rather than continuing to be asked questions premised on rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

"If, rather than minor health care reform, the US adopted a system like Germany's or Frances, with high quality health care for all, no waiting times, and no danger of losing insurance or going bankrupt due to health care costs, would you be willing to pay higher taxes?"

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