I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
While national polling shows a majority of Americans prefer the public option, a poll conducted by Research and Polling Inc. for the Albuquerque Journal found that a plurality of registered voters in New Mexico oppose the public option. But statistician and polling guru Nate Silver says there are five important ingredients to good polling on health care–and the Journal missed two.
In a telephone survey of 402 registered voters was conducted from Sept. 8-10, The Albuquerque Journal poll asked this question: “Do you favor or oppose creating a public health care plan run by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies?
The results were 49 percent opposed; 42 percent in favor; 9 percent said it would depend or they didn’t know.
But in a post called “How to Poll on the Public Option,” Nate Silver of the polling blog FiveThirtyEight writes that polls that do not use the word “option” to indicate that any plan with a public option would offer a choice between a public plan and private plans tend to have lower results for support of the public option.
The Journal poll used “public health care plan,” but not the word “option.”
Instead, Silver praised a Quinnipiac poll that asked, “Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?”
As he writes:
This is a perfect question. It makes clear that the public option is an insurance program, rather than a program to provide health care services. It uses the less ambiguous phrase “government” rather than the more ambiguous phrase “public”. It makes clear that the public option is a choice. It avoids leading the respondent by comparing the public option to Medicare. And it asks in unambiguous terms whether the respondent supports or opposes the proposal.
62 percent of people support the public option in Quinnipiac’s August 5th poll, versus 32 percent opposed.
In addition, Silver says a good question makes clear that the ‘public option’ “refers unambiguously to a type of health insurance, and not the actual provision of health care services by the government.” As an example, he cites a poll that uses the same wording as the Journal:
In general, this is a concept that a lot of people seem to be unnecessarily confused by (although I suspect that a lot of the “confusion” is deliberate). The recent NBC/WSJ poll gets this wrong, referring to a “public health care plan” rather than a “public health insurance plan”. So does this Rasmussen poll, which refers to a “public health insurance company.”
