Sep 14 2009
Polls Not Turning Towards Obamacare
Polls are out and not looking good for our young President’s health care proposals.
ABC News show no change after his prime time infomercial to Congress:
Bottom line: right now, voters are almost exactly where they were before the speech.
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Big question II: is dropping the public option the game-changer? Olympia Snowe says it’s the only way to get a bill through the Senate, and our poll shows a significant shift in support: from 46-48 to 50-42.
Here are the key numbers:
Split on Obama’s handling of health care: 48-48 (46-50 August 17)
Support Obama’s health care reforms: 46-48 (45-50 August 17)
President Obama’s job approval is at 54 (57 August 17)
Deficit: 65% think health care reform will make it worse
Medicare: 56% of seniors think it will weaken MedicareOn the crucial “what’s in it for me?” question, twice as many Americans (32-16) think it will make their own care worse, twice as many (40-20) think it will increase their costs, and more than three times as many (37-11) think it will hurt their coverage.
The poll also indicates that Americans remain split on the president’s plans on health care reform, with 51 percent favoring Obama’s proposals and 46 percent opposed. Late last month, 48 percent of people questioned in a CNN survey backed the president’s health care proposals, and 51 percent oppose them.
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“A majority of Americans over the age of 65 continue to oppose his plan, and 44 percent of seniors say that Medicare recipients would be worse off under the Obama plan.” Obama’s approval rating also remains below 50 percent among seniors, says Holland.
This is one of the weakest ‘bounces’ I think I have seen. I have been saying for months the Democrats are playing with fire as they keep pushing policies that seniors and their families oppose in no uncertain or mild terms. In off year elections it is the older voters who show up in droves. More and more they don’t believe the Democrats or buy the President’s promises.
Who would? If covering the 12-30 million uninsured is the challenge ahead of us then there are easy solutions which do not require disrupting our system and putting government bureaucrats and their cost saving rationing into the mix.
Right NOW we pay for the uninsured through premiums and prices which cover all the treatments being performed outside insurance. We already pay for the gap between costs and government programs. The math that does not add up is somehow, getting these people on insurance always costs a helluva lot more than just paying for them they way we are now!
President Obama knows this and even admits he has to tax beneficiaries (or the insurance companies – same difference) and cut mythical waste and fraud to get these people into insurance programs. It is mind numbingly incoherent. $1 trillion dollars to move them out of emergency rooms and into insurance?
Here’s the plan that would work. The real problem is the unemployed (now at historic highs thanks to Obamanomics and the failed liberal ‘stimulus’ bill). If as part of their unemployment benefits people could opt into Medicare/Medicaid policies on a short term basis (with some of their premiums being paid from their unemployment compensation), then we could cover a vast majority of the truly needy with the unspent stimulus bill money.
Combine that with removing precondition limits, interstate competition and small business-individual insurance pools and we have most of the problem solved using common and agreed to ground. Forget the mythical cost savings from Medicare waste and abuse.
DC is over-engineering this because they are not trying to solve problems but implement fringe ideology. America’s core ideology is just fine – and government needs to get out of our lives, not intertwined in all our decisions and choices.
AJ this could be really big, didn’t know where to put it. Wo it’s here…….
September 14, 2009
BREAKING: Ayatollah calls for overthrow of Tehran regime tomorrow.
In an extraordinary development, MEMRI reports that Ayatollah Montazeri, who has been a major critic of the Khomeinist regime, in effect called for a mass uprising to begin tomorrow, Qods Day, when mass demonstrations are put on by the regime. The question is whether Montazeri’s call for other clerics to preach against the regime tomorrow will bring out gigantic protest crowds. The regime cannot stop the annual Qods Day demonstrations without losing face.
According to MEMRI’s translation from Persian,
“In his message, Ayatollah Montazeri came out against the regime, which he said had shed the blood of innocent civilians while committing human rights violations. Throughout history, he wrote, Iran’s senior clerics had come out against the injustices and oppression of tyrannical regimes in Iran, and took pride in always standing up against them and defending the law and the rights of the people. …
Montazeri called on the clerics to declare out loud that they oppose the regime. He said that instead of representing the voice of the people, the regime had brought about a most terrible situation of violence against defenseless men and women and of oppression, to the point of causing their shehada (deaths), in some cases in prison. …
He concluded by saying that the Iranian people is asking why the clerics are not coming out against the oppression and the injustice. … The regime, Montazeri told the clerics, is exploiting you, and your silence makes you its collaborators. ”
Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. Qods Day demonstrations are virtually certain to take place, bringing out hundreds of thousands of people. The regime’s brutal police and enforcers may be outnumbered. This may just be the beginning of the end for Ahmadinejad and his boss, Khamenei.
What the international consequences will be is anybody’s guess, but it is hard to find anything worse than the present regime.
Kathie,
Worth watching!
I wonder if tonight Montazeri will suddenly suffer an “aspirin overdose” like Christopher Kelley, advisor to a certain former Illinois Governor did.
Kathy, do you have the link for that article? I went to the MEMRI webpage; but, couldn’t find it. Thanks.
Yeah, Obama got a baby bounce from all his massive effort. You know what they say about baby bounces don’t you? They usually end up in the diaper within days.
And, the thing is…..what wasn’t to like about what Obama said his plan represented (except of public option)? The problem is that there was no bill that had any of what Obama said in it…..and we all know it.
Isn’t that what was so stupid about the whole speech thing?
Sounds to me like Obama is just trying to win support for reform in general at this point. Just wait until the details come out. That is when the real debate starts.
Frogg…..AmericanThinker.
Obama and the dems think we are all stupid and unfortunately, some of us are. They care nothing for us or our opinions until election day and call us “Bubba” otherwise.
AJ,
Did you catch this passage in this link?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession.html
South Korean shipyard Hanjin Heavy Industries last week said it had been forced to put up for sale three container ships ordered at a cost of £60 million ($100 million) by the Iranian state shipping line after the Iranians said they could not pay the bill.
We may well see the Iranian and North Korea states go down in the current recession for reasons unrelated to their nukes.
The problem is that the South Koreans may well be going with them.