Just One Word

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The trouble with polls is you word the question to get the answer you want.  Sometimes the addition or subtraction of a single word will do,  Sam Stein reports that a SurveyUSA poll today showed that 77 percent of those surveyed approve of the CHOICE of a public option.  The contrasts with an NBC poll earlier in the week  that reported only 43 percent approve of a public option.  So how do we explain this?

Earlier in the week, after pollsters for NBC dropped the word "choice" from their question on a public option, they found that only 43 percent of the public were in favor of "creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies."

Opponents of the president's agenda jumped on the findings as evidence that backing for the public option was dropping. Proponents responded by arguing that NBC's tinkering with the language of the question (which it had also done in its July survey) had contributed to the drop in favorability for a public plan.

SurveyUSA's poll, which was commissioned by the progressive group MoveOn.org, a proponent of the public plan, gives credence to those critiques. While arguments about what type of language best describe the public option persist --"choice" is considered a trigger word that everyone naturally supports -- it seems clear that the framing of the provision goes a long way toward determining its popularity.

In asking its question SurveyUSA used the same exact words that NBC/Wall Street Journal had used when conducting its June 2009 survey. That one that found 76 percent approval for the public option: "In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance--extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important?"

So by leaving out the word CHOICE NBC was able to make it appear that people opposed the public option.  Now this is important because those polls numbers are watched by politicians to see which way the wind is blowing so the results can impact legislation.