Healthcare Reform Polls: If you’re governing by the numbers, at least get the numbers right.

This article (worded in predictably bellicose HuffPo prose) talks about a poll last week on the healthcare reform debate. Poll numbers like these are regularly cited on the right side of the fence to support the idea that the American people do not want healthcare reform. The responses for “do you favor or oppose the current healthcare proposal?” look bad for the reformers and good for the opposition: 47% oppose it and only 41% are in favor. However, if you look at why people oppose vs. support the current reform, a different picture emerges.

It seems that a healthy chunk of those who oppose the current proposal do so because they are in favor of healthcare reform in general, but the current proposal doesn’t go far enough. Lots of people apparently agree with Dennis Kucinich.

When you look at who’s actually in favor of healthcare reform in general, versus opposed to it, you get just over 49% in favor and only 30% opposed. Half in favor of reform. Less than a third opposed to it. If the Senate looked like that, the opposition would not be able to filibuster.

Notably, however, the Senate is not debating healthcare reform in general. They’re debating the current bill. If the poll is to be believed (and this caliber of poll generally is), the majority of Americans want healthcare reform, but half of those supporters want the Democrats’ current proposal killed because it’s not enough.

Here’s my quick-and-dirty Excel layout of the results  (after the cut).

p.s. 11% were undecided about the current proposal, with another 9% or so initially stating a position — pro or con — but unable to answer the follow-up question about why they had picked their position; this makes for almost 20% undecided.

p.p.s.s. The Gallup poll reported on the same pollingreport.com page shows that Americans don’t generally trust either the Republicans or the Democrats to “…recommend the right thing for reforming the U.S. health care system.”
The only groups in this poll we trust less than the parties are the pharmaceutical companies and the HMOs. Americans do, however, seem to trust University researchers (yay) and hospitals, by a ratio of 2 to 1, and over 3/4 of Americans seem to trust medical doctors to recommend healthcare reform. This last point is interesting because the AMA has endorsed both the overall need for reforming our current system and the original House of Representatives bill, last year.