Polling Helps Obama Frame Message in Health-Care Debate

[FreakinDJ]

Source: Washington Post

Polling Helps Obama Frame Message in Health-Care Debate

President Obama has framed the health-care debate in Washington as a campaign against insurance companies whose irresponsible actions, he repeatedly says, must be reined in to control costs and improve patient care. In North Carolina this week, he told an audience that the existing system "works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn't always work well for you."

The message is no accident, as the president's chief pollster made clear in a rare public speech last month. Joel Benenson told the Economic Club of Canada that extensive polling revealed to the White House what many there had guessed: People hate insurance companies.

"Take the public plan, for example," Benenson said. "Initial reaction to it wasn't as positive as it is now. . . . But we figured out that people like the idea of competition versus the insurance company, and that's why you get a number like 72 percent supporting it."

Earlier in the speech in Toronto, Benenson said bluntly that people "think the insurance companies have been the villains here, not the government."


Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073001547.html

---

I would like to see some polling of how Americans feel about Lobbyist trying to Derail any true reforms (including a public option plan) to Health-care

[Captain Hilts]

1. THIS is what I did in polling, so I noticed PresBO's use of 'health INSURANCE reform' in his press

conference. It was an important shift. I hope it's not too late.

A good article.

[Proletariatprincess]

2. Obama needs to make the ethical/moral argument too.

It needs to be said...loudly and repeatedly:

HEALTHCARE FOR PROFIT IS IMMORAL AND UNETHICAL AND IS CAUSING AMERICANS TO SUFFER AND DIE UNNECESARILY.

Nancy Pelosi put her toe in the water when she said that Insurance companies are immoral. Her poll numbers went up almost immediately.

Obama has no trouble with mentioning religion and god and hope. Too much for my taste, it is why I couldn't bring myself to vote for him.
But for all his rightiousness about faith, where is his anger about the imoral criminality of for-profit health care that victimizes those amoung us who find ourselves sick or injured?

"Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be." --- St Augustine.

[pattmarty]

3. AND, whenever the conservatives talk about government run...............

.......healthcare, they need to remind them of Medicare and the VA. Both these programs are well liked by the elderly and by veterans and work quite well considering both are underfunded. Actually the VA is more like the British system in that the doctors and hospitals work for and are owned by the government.

[loudsue]

4. It's still so much bullshit. We are being duped, yet again.

Let's review this movie: We've seen it over and over and we still don't know how it ends?

Here are the rules:

The corporations OWN our congress, and our president is beholden to those same masters.
Our congressional reps are on their way home for recess.
Our congressional reps DO NOT want to be on the hot seat with their constituents when they get home.
Our congressional reps KNOW that the country wants REAL health care, and they know that they ARE NOT GOING TO GIVE IT TO US, because the corps wouldn't allow it.
The Dem leadership in partnership with their corporate masters KNEW they had the votes to DEFEAT real health care reform BEFORE they started acting like they were on the side of the "little people" (that's us... the "little" people... ) .

We are being fed a pile of horse feathers. Now is the time to RAISE HELL and DEMAND single payer... free health insurance for ALL Americans. Because when all these newly-developed rebels come back to Washington from their districts, they're going to screw us royally... without the KY jelly.

DON'T BE DUPED AGAIN!

[Iowa]

5. Well said!

:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: