POLITICS: What's The Matter With Kansas and Every Place Else?

Health Affairs, as you know if you've read us or any other health policy blog this week, devoted its May/June issue to health reform, and held a forum on health politics in DC this week. (Merrill Goozner did a nice summary including an update of what the Congressional Budget Office is doing to gear up for health reform.) They also did a conference call recently summing up the political landscape with Bob Blendon of Harvard's Kennedy School and School of Public Health, Julie Rovner of NPR and Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc. and the Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review blog. Here's a recap from the Health Affairs blog, and here's the transcript.

Blendon pointed out that most voters are not college-educated and will not be voting based on the minutiae of policy plans; they want a debate about the big picture on topics like health care, trade etc. Laszewski thought that John McCain was vulnerable because people wouldn't have much faith in his approach to covering the sickest, hardest to insure people; Democrats, he said, would be able to depict it as another health care "train wreck."

An interesting tidbit from Rovner who found a surprising level of support for single-payer in Kansas of all places. “It’s not just a matter of people wanting the security of what they have now. People, if anything, want to go more towards the government and less towards the market.” Rovner was “not suggesting that there is a groundswell of a majority for a single-payer system. But I am suggesting that as people see costs go up, I think they are looking more towards the government and less towards the private market as a way to protect themselves.”

(I should disclose that Bob Blendon has answered approximately one zillion questions from me over the past 15 years and taught me a great deal of what I know about health politics and Julie is my pal.)