POLITICS: The Pollsters Are Calling! How Americans See Health Care Reform

This week we attended a Health Affairs event on Health Reform and the 2008 Election at the Willard (excellent coffee), where Celinda Lake (Lake Research Partners) and Bill McInturff (Public Opinion Strategies) entertained the crowd with the good, the bad, and the ugly stories of polling Americans' great thoughts on health care reform. The pollsters represent different sides of the aisle but agreed that: 1) Americans believe that health care costs are linked to the well-being of our overall economy; and 2) The next American president has a "unique window" to change the health care system early in the first term.

Lake, the Democrat, offered many interesting tidbits about what Americans want in their health care reform:

1. Prevention (not wellness)
2. Provider choice (they definitely don't want to lose access to their doctors)
3. Peace of mind about plan choice (they want to keep their policy and benefits if they like them)
4. Control (this is related to the previous two elements)
5. An American Solution (not Canadian-style reform—they want something uniquely American).

Lake also discovered what Americans do not want to hear:

1. Cost-shifting (people don't understand this concept)
2. Losing employer-sponsored coverage that they like
3. Government-run clinics
4. Scarce resources—people are worried about too-short appointments and being 30th in line for surgeries or tests
5. Their doctors are part of the problem—people love their doctors and do not believe that many tests are "waste" in the system. People think that the administrative burdens on doctors are the waste in the system.

McInturff, the Republican, offered his sense that the country is poised to undergo radical health care system change. He noted that more than half (55 percent) of Americans want government to do more in health care and a third (36 percent) say they want radical health care change—despite the fact that people are concerned about disrupting the current system that is working for them. McInturff also feels that Americans are not interested in trade-offs (paying more for insurance so their neighbor will have insurance too). Mostly, Americans want the next President to compromise with the next Congress so that they can pick coverage they like, keep it when they leave a job or move away, in a way that creates a more competitive marketplace to bring down health care costs.

McInturff also recently did a poll for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, released yesterday, showing that while jobs and the economy has replaced health care as the top domestic concern for most voters, Americans still see a close and clear link between economic security and affordable health care. In fact, given 10 options for how to best improve the economic wellbeing of an average American, making health care more affordable and providing health care coverage for all Americans ranked the top two. (By a more than 2-to-1 margin, voters were more interested in making health affordable than covering the uninsured. )

Sure, no problem. We'll get right on it.