How High is Public Support for Medicare for All?

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Thursday October 22, 2009 · 1:39 PM PDT

2009/10/22 · 13:39

It seems to me that many people who consider themselves left wing are unaware of the polling data on Medicare for All. On the one the hand we have the Democratic establishment crowd, who typically assume that, because Democratic leaders largely oppose Medicare for All, public opinion must be against it as well. (About four of one hundred favor it in the Senate.) On the other hand we have the Medicare for All activist crowd, who sometimes believe support is higher than it really is. (For example, a two thirds majority hasn't been recorded in any poll this year.)

To explain the true situation, I did the following exercise.

I took all the polls I could find from this year on single payer or Medicare for All, along with a roughly equal number of polls on the "public option," and plotted them on this graph:

There are four bands in this picture. The first two bands, one black and one red, represent Medicare for All support and opposition. In any poll, we will have a certain number in support, a certain number opposed, and some undecideds. The next two bands represent support and opposition to the public option. The blue dots represent the mean of the closest band. The mean for the first band indicates that a very narrow majority (50.4%) is in support of Medicare for All and a slightly larger majority supports the public option.

The Medicare for All polls I used are listed here. Most are available through this link. I also made sure to use the one commented on by Matthew Yglesias here.

Kaiser Tracking Poll (Phrasing #1, yearly average) 46.8-49%

Kaiser Tracking Poll (Phrasing #2) 58-38%

CBS/NYT Poll (covering only emergency problems) 59-32%

CBS/NYT Poll (covering all medical problems) 49-42%

Grove Opinion Research Corp. Poll 59-?%

Time Magazine Poll 49-46%

Rasmussen Poll 32-57%

The public option polls I used were:

Rasmussen Poll 41-41%

Kaiser Tracking Poll 65-29%

Economist/YouGov Poll 41-33%

CBS/NYT Poll 72-20%

Quinnipiac Poll 62-32%

Time/SRBI 56-36%

Choosing public option polls required some thought because there are so many. I adhered to the following guideline: either use Nate Silver's recommended polls or choose one from the same source as a Medicare for All poll. (All the polls above are also linked to by Silver's page.)

At this point I thought it would be helpful to try to get rid of polls that might not be valid and look at the results. Therefore, I removed both polls by Rasmussen because the way they're phrased seems biased. I also removed the NYT/CBS figure asking about coverage of emergency problems only, since Medicare for All would cover more than that. (Of course, one could argue that the other figure for all medical problems is bad too, since Medicare doesn't cover all medical problems. Ideally, we might perhaps then use a weighted average, but I did not bother.) Finally, I threw out the CBS/NYT public option poll because it calls the public option a plan like Medicare, which it is not.

Here are the results.

The full version of this blog post is available at ZBlogs. (You will need to click the link twice due to the Emergency Funding Appeal.)

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How High is Public Support for Medicare for All?

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