What Is All the Fuss About Again?

TW: Nate Silver does nice job reminding wonky types that much of what passes for political debate and angst is missed by the majority of folks getting on with their lives. One can find poll after poll showing "the public option" as either well supported or poorly supported. These results are possible because most folks do not really know what the "public option" is and are highly susceptible to wording of the poll depending on their pre-existing biases. Furthermore, while those involved in the debate or actively following it may get excited about the details most Americans just are not. This dynamic is neither new nor unusual. It does, however, partailly explain how elites and interest groups dominate legislation for better or worse.

From Nate Silver at 528.com
"It is tempting to attribute these results to attempts by conservatives to blur the distinctions of the health care debate. And surely that is part of the story. But it may not be all that much of it. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to correctly identify the public option in this poll, but not by all that wide a margin -- 41 percent versus 34 percent. Meanwhile, 35 percent of Republicans thought the public option refers to "creating a national healthcare system like they have in Great Britain" -- but so did 23 percent of Democrats.

This should serve as something of a reality check for people on both sides of the public option debate. If the respondents had simply chosen randomly among the three options provide to them, 33 percent would have selected the correct definition for the public option. Instead, only 37 percent did (although 23 percent did not bother to guess).

This is mostly a debate being had among policy elites and the relatively small fraction of the public that is highly knowledgeable and engaged about health care reform; for most others, the details are lost on them.This is also why relatively small changes in wording can trigger dramatic shifts in support for the public option, which has been as high as 83 percent in some polls and as low as 35 percent in others depending on who is doing the polling and how they're asking the questions. You don't see those sorts of discrepancies when polling about, say, gay marriage or the death penalty, where the options are a little bit more self-evident...

More generally, there seems to be a sort of arm's-race on both sides of the debate to conduct crappy, manipulative polls on health care reform, and the public option in particular. This poll belongs in the 'crap' pile, as do most of the others. Defenders of the public option, however, should have little to fret about: the most neutrally and accurately-worded polls on the public option -- these are the ones from Quinnipiac and Time/SRBI -- suggest that their position is in the majority, with 56-62 percent of the public supporting the public option and 33-36 percent opposed. "
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/08/poll-most-dont-know-what-public-option.html

TW: And I would agree with Smith as well with caveat that the debate has never really been about policy it has always been about broader politics.

From Ben Smith at Politico:
"The health care debate is no longer about health care: It's about partisan politics, change and fear of change, technology, and the role of government. It may be possible to turn the debate in the Senate back toward policy; I don't see how the public debate becomes wonkier."