The Power of the Word Medicare -

[slipslidingaway]

When the word Medicare is used in the various polls, the number of people who favor the plan automatically jumps, it makes no difference if the question relates to the public option or a national insurance system such as single-payer...the word "Medicare" has a favorable connotation.

The Kaiser Health Tracking poll is one of the few recent polls that asks about a single-payer plan or government run insurance plan for all, many of the polls leave SP out altogether and that includes the widely cited poll from June saying that 72% of people want a public option.

What Kaiser did, at times, was half sample certain questions.

For instance if they were sampling 1200 people, they would ask about a public plan "like Medicare" to only half of the people. The other half they would leave out the word "Medicare" and the support for a public plan, or single-payer, would drop.

Back in July their poll showed a jump in support for SP and I posted about it below, when there was a half sample I used the highest number, regardless of whether or not it was about a public option or SP.

Links to prior polls...
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/slipslidingaway/64

Main link...
http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/trackingpoll.cfm


Now their August poll has just been released and they did not half sample the public option or single-payer questions, what they did do is include the word "Medicare" when asking about the public option and exclude it from the question about single-payer, guess what happened to the single-payer poll...it dropped.

In addition to the charts that they post, they also post the questions with the numbers listed for each question from prior polls. You would think there might be consistency in listing prior numbers, but that is not what they did with the August list, they posted the higher number for the public option and the lower number for SP.


August poll charts link, page 9

http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/upload/7965.pdf

August poll questions, pages 10 and 11

http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/upload/7964.pdf


The devil is in the details.

;-)