The New Health Dialogue

Americans are still divided over health reform. According to the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll (Kaiser's first poll since the passage of health reform), 46 percent of Americans have a very or somewhat favorable view of the law, while 40 percent have a very or somewhat unfavorable view of the law. The remaining 14 percent are undecided. Though they may not understand the specifics of the legislation, most Americans (81 percent) are aware that the President signed health reform into law this year.

The good news is that the more people learn about the benefits of health reform, the more they like it. As previous polls indicated, specific provisions of reform are very popular. Over 70 percent of Americans have a favorable view of prohibiting denials of health insurance coverage to children with pre-existing conditions, allowing children to stay on their parents insurance until they are 26, creating a short term high risk pool to provide coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions, and beginning to close the Medicare Part D prescription drug doughnut hole. Over 80 percent are in favor of providing tax credits to small businesses to help them cover their employees, eliminating co-pays for preventative care, and making it harder for insurance companies to drop customers when they get sick.

But here's the bad news. Misinformation about reform -- and the lack of information -- is still widespread. For example, 45 percent of Americans believe the Congressional Budget Office reported that health reform will increase the deficit. Only one in four were aware that the CBO analysis concluded reform would in fact decrease the deficit over the next ten years by $124 billion. Only 23 percent of Americans believe that health reform will increase the quality of care they receive, even though a significant portion of the reform law consists of delivery system reforms to restructure financial incentives and improve the quality of care for all Americans.

Over 60 percent of Americans believe that health reform will benefit the uninsured, low income Americans, and those with pre-existing conditions, but only 45 percent believe it will benefit the country as a whole. A majority of Americans are confused about the law (55 percent) and would like more information before they make a judgment call about how the law will affect them personally (56 percent). In the absence of a more widespread and thorough understanding of what’s in the law, opinions on health reform are falling sharply along partisan lines -- 72 percent of Democrats think the country will be better off with reform, and 72 percent of Republicans think the country will be worse off with health reform.

Health reform has been a hot topic for debate and discussion over the past year and a half. As such, Americans say they got their information about reform from a variety of different sources, including conversations with friends and family (73 percent), cable news such as FOX or CNN (67 percent), broadcast news like ABC or NBC (60 percent), the radio (54 percent) and newspapers (49 percent). (And we’d like to make special mention of the 26 percent of you who said you got information from blogs!) When respondents were asked to rank the importance of the source they got their information from, cable news was number one by a sizable margin (36 percent). The closest second was broadcast news, which only 16 percent of people ranked as their number one source of info.

To read more, check out the results of poll here.