On health care, we want change, Mr. President ... just not your change
Published: September 8, 2009
Updated: September 8, 2009
Remember what U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said about the health care reform bill at the National Press Club on Aug. 4?
“I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”
A CBS poll taken at the end of August found that 69 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats also find the proposed health care reforms confusing.
One of the results of the public’s confusion is President Obama’s lowest-ever job approval rating.
In a New York Times op-ed piece, columnist David Brooks noted, “The number of Americans who trust President Obama to make the right decisions has fallen by roughly 17 percentage points. Obama’s job approval is down to about 50 percent. All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but in the history of polling, no newly elected American president has fallen this far this fast.”
In his column “The Obama Slide,” Brooks says: “The public has soured on Obama’s policy proposals. Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does, but more and more have a growing conviction that if the president is proposing it, it must involve big spending, big government and a fundamental departure from the traditional American approach.”
The economic experts in the National Association for Business Economics appear to agree with Brooks. Most NABE members believe that none of the major proposals now under consideration would bring a net improvement in the access, quality or cost of health care.
Their recent survey asked which reform option they preferred: a single-payer system; an individual mandate to purchase insurance; an employee mandate to provide insurance; a public insurance option; or “other.”
The most popular choice of NABE members was “other.”
Those financial experts have the same opinion as the voters CNN polled in a telephone survey released Wednesday. More than half said they opposed Mr. Obama’s plan, and, in fact, 45 percent of them said that Congress should just stop working on the health care reform plans.
But Richard Trumka, incoming president of the AFL-CIO, warned congressional Democrats that if they don’t pass a government health care plan, they will “Do so at your peril.”
Trumka told ABC News: “There are three absolute musts: You have to have an employer mandate; you can’t tax the benefits of workers to pay for it; and it has to have a public option.”
Elected Democrats may instead want to consider the CNN poll which found that exactly 50 percent of the people surveyed said they would be likely or very likely to vote for a Democrat who opposed President Obama’s health care reforms. And the reason for that support, the survey found, was because 52 percent of the persons polled felt more secure with the existing health care system than with Obama’s proposed reforms, even though 91 percent agree that some health care reform is needed.
The public seems to be saying, “We want change, Mr. President, but not your change.”
Richard Cohen of The Washington Post gets the last word. He wrote that some of the confusion with the health care reform “has to do with the unavoidable complexity of any legislation.
But some of it has to do with the president’s inability to simply say what he wants and why that’s good for us. The failure here is twofold: the message and the messenger. … The message needs to be fixed, and so, with some tough introspection, does the man.”
Sharman’s column appears each Tuesday on the editorial page.
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Reader Reactions
For everyone afraid of government run health care, here’s a great U-Tube to watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6x2x0RYErE
rjma, I said that because of the argument that many on the extreme right wing fringe has claimed that Obama won the election because of the fraud of Acorn and the absentee votes that Obama received. When it was proved that Obama would have won anyway, even if we did not count these votes.
Sorry, I said: “And don’t let his poor Dad become a capitalist, because if he should endeavor to make $2000 a year, his 4 children, including the one with cancer, will be kicked out of the VA Medicaid program.“
Meant to say that if his Dad endeavored to make $2000 more dollars a year than he presently makes, then…...
OW- How many people voted for Obama who were fraudulently registered by Acorn? You seem to forget that the registrar confirms all the registrations. Again, how many people voted who shouldn’t have?
I’m looking at things practical here. Even with fraud from Acorn factored in, the ‘in-person’ voters of our nation, voted Obama in office. They must’ve liked his change, and he spelled out the changes he wanted in our health insurance industry before he was elected.
Now, since early summer, since Obama has not come out and clearly declared his proposals in alignment with his campaign declarations, I believe his poll numbers that are slipping are from his own base, because he wondered from them, not because the same people that never liked him in the first place has gained in numbers.
Since this is my guess, I don’t have a factual basis to support it, but I can say that the same percentage of people that did not vote for him are in the same number range as his disapproval rating today.
I hope that made sense. Though I did not vote for Obama, and don’t care for some things he’s already said and done, I do agree with his DOING SOMETHING attitude, rather than those DOING NOTHING. We’ve yet to see a real substantial health care reform bill from the Republicans, though we are now promised one this week. I hope it is not the same weak one that McCain proposed during his campaign, and that is to give a $5000 tax credit, to people who don’t pay taxes anyway, or can’t use that to buy a policy with. Because that alone says they do not understand the problem.
Because my grandson’s health insurance policy alone would cost $24,000 a year, and would not cover his pre-existing condition, a tax credit don’t cut it for me. And don’t let his poor Dad become a capitalist, because if he should endeavor to make $2000 a year, his 4 children, including the one with cancer, will be kicked out of the VA Medicaid program.
The three elderly people living with my husband and I are quite happy with the Medicare and Veterans benefits, which are government run. Before they went on it about 15 years ago, their insurance policy through Blue/Cross was $33,000 a year.
I know these programs are broke, and doing nothing is not an option. In 10 years my grandchildren will face costs in healthcare that they cannot afford when they are dropped from the VA medicaid program. So we no longer have the luxury of taking our time to fix what is already broken, no matter what economic problems we face as a nation today or why.
Mr. Sharman has a history of being fixated on poll numbers, esp. if he can use them to promote his personal agenda.
But Mike, it is sort of sporting that if you trash someone, that you actually offer up something as an alternative. Is that so hard?
Why didn’t ol’ Mike give us Obama’s approval levels as actual numbers instead of insinuating they are bad?
“We want change, Mr. President. we don’t actually know what we want, but we are sure it isn’t anything you offer.“
Sharman is a perfect example of simply being unable to say what he means. I mean why else would the only remedy he has offered involve a group of like minded people who would not accept most of us because our religion doesn’t match theirs? Sharman needs to give us a message that is clear and as a man he definitely needs “fixed”.
I don’t always agree with Sharman, but on this I do. What do the Union Reps have to do with healthcare? I am so sick of Chicago style Mob methods. What in the world do these people mean by do so at your own peril? If they meant political ruin, they would not have used a term associated with violence. Maybe it’s time to unload the white elephant called unions.
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