As the Senate pushes its way through reform this week, and spending whatever holiday break they then have considering the House conference, Congressional leaders and Obama need to keep this poll from Friday, in mind. Greg Sargent:
The poll by the nonpartisan Research 2000 for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America, to be released today, finds that more Americans are skeptical of the mandate when they are told that 30 million people will be required to get coverage while only some receive subsidies. The question:
If the government requires 30 million uninsured Americans to buy health insurance, and gives subsidies to some Americans to help them afford this insurance, would it be accurate to say this plan, quote, "PROVIDES" 30 million Americans with health insurance?
Yes: 36%
No: 48%
"This poll confirms that voters get it," Jim Dean, the head of DFA and the brother of Howard "kill the bill" Dean, emails. "The Senate bill doesn’t actually ‘provide’ 30 million Americans with coverage — instead it makes them criminals if they don’t buy insurance from the same companies that got us into this mess."
"Providing" and "forcing people to buy" insurance, subsidized or not, is not the same thing in the majority of people's minds. And it's not a particularly popular idea. When Research 2000 asked "Would you favor or oppose requiring all Americans to buy health insurance -- the so-called mandate -- even if they find insurance too expensive or do not want it," 51% oppose, 38% favor.
When asked "Would you favor or oppose a health care bill that does NOT include a public health insurance option and does NOT expand Medicare, but DOES require all Americans to get health insurance," 58% oppose, 33% favor.
The "have to pass" this bill crowd keeps telling us that it'll all be ok because Congress wil come back and fix this later, that we'll never know when we're going to have supermajorities in Congress and a Democratic White House so we have to do that now. That's, as kos says more reason to make this legislation as strong, as progressive as possible, not to pass half measures.
What better way to force them to come back to "fix the bill" than to hold out on passing the mandates in this bill until they are actually supposed to go into effect? Why not, as Jon Walker and David have argued, leave the mandates out of the bill for now.
Those mandates don't do anything for anybody for the next four years. Why do they need to sit idly in the books except as "insurance" to the insurance companies (while we get no such guarantees regarding the "fixes" we need)? Indeed, handing over the mandates now would appear to be pretty good insurance against the need for insurers to agree to allow the Congress to come back and "fix" anything.
Holding some of the cards in this against the insurance companies wouldn't be bad politics, either. Make them demonstrate in the next four years that they will comply with reform, that they will make an effort to hold down costs to consumers, and then give them their mandate.
It'd be a lot more popular than forcing people to buy junk insurance and telling them that you're "providing" it.