Jacob Hacker’s ambiguous polls - By Kip Sullivan, JD - Part 4 of 6

[slipslidingaway]

http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/12/11/two-thirds-support-4/

Two-thirds of Americans support Medicare-for-all (#4 of 6)

In Part 2 and Part 3 of this series I reviewed rigorous evidence from multiple sources supporting the statement that somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of Americans support a Medicare-for-all system. A reasonably conservative averaging of the more rigorously conducted research I reviewed – the citizen jury results and the results of polls that asked accurate and relatively informative questions – indicates two-thirds of Americans support a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system.

In this part and in Part 5, I will examine the basis for the claim by representatives of the “public option” movement that only a minority of Americans support single-payer and a majority are opposed. The basis for that claim consists primarily of several papers written by Jacob Hacker and “research” done for the Herndon Alliance by pollster Celinda Lake. Until about two years ago, Hacker wrote about health policy primarily for the academic community; since then he has published frequently in the lay media. Since its formation in 2005, the Herndon Alliance has sought to create “research” that could be used to persuade the public, especially legislators and political activists, that single-payer should be taken off the table and the “public option” should be put on the table. I review Hacker’s work in this paper and Celinda Lake’s in Part 5.

Expediency-driven health policy

It may sound sacrilegious to say this …, but the greatest lesson of the failure of the Clinton health plan is that reformers pay too much attention to policy and too little to politics. If real estate is about location, location, location, health reform is about politics, politics, politics.

Thus spake Jacob Hacker in a paper published in Health Affairs in 2008 entitled, “Putting politics first.” Hacker argues that anyone who wants to achieve universal health insurance must somehow separate “politics” from “policy” and give highest priority to politics. If Hacker had merely said that anyone who seeks to achieve universal health insurance should devote resources to building public pressure for it, his statement would be incontrovertible. It would be a truism. But Hacker’s “politics, politics, politics” statement went beyond the truism that “reformers” must build a movement for universal health insurance...."


Link to previous parts and threads...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7193764&mesg_id=7193764