Thursday, September 17, 2009

Most insured Americans at least say they're happy

I just came across this study by the Kaiser family foundation that found that, of all insured Americans, the majority say they are happy with their plan. Deeper digging revealed that different groups of people, including those in lower socioeconomic groups, were not so pleased. Furthermore, more questions showed that even those people who said they were pleased with their plans really did have quite a few gripes. I think this data gets at part of the challenge of convincing US citizens that health reform is necessary. Most of the time, people will be relatively happy with the status quo. In many cases, if people are the ones who have chosen the status quo (i.e. people feel as though they're choosing their health insurance), they're even more likely to say they're happy with it, if only to justify their choice. When you start asking more questions, you may find, as this study did, that people are unhappy with most aspects of something, but they're still, overall, going to be convinced they mostly like it, if only because it's familiar and they know they don't hate it. If the majority of Americans are insured (which they are), and if the majority of the uninsured claim to like their insurance provider (which this study claims), and if many people believe that the public option (or, more broadly, health care reform of any sort) will change their insurance (which people do), then it will be very hard to convince people to change. By that logic, there are 2 options: convince people that all those things they said they didn't like about their insurance are actually large enough problems for them to admit they're dissatisfied overall with their insurance, or convince them that the public option won't affect their own choices. Obama has clearly been trying to do the latter in his speeches, and the former seems time-consuming and complicated (pointing out the faults of these enormous insurance companies will not be a politically-popular move). My question, then, is what you all think about whether people can really be convinced either that things aren't as great as they seem, or that what they think they like really won't change. Or is it even necessary to convince people of either?

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