Gallup: Americans abandoning desire for government healthcare

by Rossputin | 7:44 am, November 13, 2009 | Comments Off

In a new poll, Gallup finds that for the first time since they started asking the question (in 2001), “More Americans now believe it is not the government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage (50%) than think it is (47%).”

From the Gallup article on their poll:

Also, when it came to the question of whether to maintain or replace the current system, maintaining the system outpolled replacing it by 29%, close to its all-time strongest support:

Interesting notes:

The poll was taken in the few days before the House vote on healthcare “reform”.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers were even more anti-government if the poll had been taken a few days later.

The results are very partisan, with 3/4 of Republicans saying healthcare is not government’s responsibility and 3/4 of Democrats saying it is.  I wonder how much of the Democratic response is because they really believe it is and how much is because they feel a need to support the president for whom they went “all-in” without any basis other than his being young, black, hip, and (the one part which is rational) not John McCain.

The opinion of Republicans has changed much more than the opinion of Democrats in recent years, with GOP believe in government health care making a significant new low, but Democrat opinion only roughly matching a level it’s reached in the past:

Regarding the partisan divide on the question of whether to maintain or replace the current system, 86% of Republicans (or Republican leaners) said maintain while 56% of Democrats (or Democratic leaners) said replace.

As we watch Democratic leadership plunge headlong into a government takeover of heatlh care (even if they claim that isn’t what’s happening, it is), one is hard-pressed to think of a time when government was trying to hard to pass something which was widely known to be unpopular.  Immigration reform comes to mind – and we know where that went.  But the political imperative for the Democrats is (or is at least believed by them) to be so large that they cannot afford not to pass something, even if it would be arguably the single wosrt, most destructive piece of legislation in American history, and even if it would substantially raise the chances of a political rout of Democrats in next year’s elections.

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