Poll shows opposition to health care overhaul declining
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 29, 2010; 12:02 AM
Opposition to the landmark health care overhaul declined over the past month, to 35 percent from 41 percent, according to the latest results of a tracking poll, reported Thursday.
Support For Health Law Remains Steady While Opposition Drops
The percentage of people who view the new health bill unfavorably dropped 6 points to 35 percent in the past month, but that has not translated into a significant increase of supporters, according to the July tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Overall support remained stable since the June survey, with about half the public expressing a favorable view of the overhaul, the poll found.www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2010/July/29/health-reform-tracking-poll.aspx
If you find the two ledes strikingly, uh, similar, don't worry. It's not plagiarism or even laziness on the part of the WaPo. It's merely a product of the Kaiser Health News effort to "provide new opportunities for health care journalists to produce in-depth work and a new vehicle to distribute it through collaborations with major news organizations and on this Web site." You see, it's really a jobs program first and a pass through mechanism of pro-government run health care reform "news" and surveys second.
Kaiser Health News, which partners with USA Today, NPR, the New Republic along with many fair-minded types who were on the JournoList before it was circumscribed down to the Cabalist, is a venture of the Kaiser Family Foundation. The foundation provides " strategic guidance". That direction consists largely of ignoring original research critical of health care reform in its current iteration and a slavish devotion to recycling the less than balanced or nuanced coverage of the fight over the implementation of the law. Some guidance.
Case in point is the echo chamber KHN creates by paying for polls and writing articles about the polls that are then essentially reprinted by WaPo and then blogged on by the Journolistas like Ezra Klein, Jonathan Cohn, Kate Steadman, etc. It would be sinister if it weren't so banal and boring...
The KHN and it's effort to consolidate control coverage of health care reporting and the shaping of public opinion about health care should not be set aside lightly. It should be thrown away with great force...
