Majority of Public Maintains Support for Addressing Health Care ...(less likely to support if they heard) ...),Health

"Public support for health reform will depend on which arguments get through to the American people and, ultimately, how they answer the question of how will health reform affect their family," said Kaiser Vice President and Director of Public Opinion and Survey Research Mollyann Brodie.

Is One Trillion Dollars for Health Reform a Significant Threshold?

A $1 trillion price tag for health care reform appears to be a significant marker to many stakeholders and policymakers in the reform debate, but less so to the public. When asked if $1 trillion over ten years was too much, too little, or about right to spend on reform, roughly four in ten of the public say it is too high (42%), while just over a third say it is the right amount (36%), and one in ten say it is too little (9%). Belief that $1 trillion is too much drops to about three in ten when three separate arguments are tested on those who initially say $1 trillion is too much.

Methodology

The survey was designed and analyzed by public opinion researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation and was conducted July 7 through July 14, 2009, among a nationally representative random sample of 1,205 adults ages 18 and older. Telephone interviews conducted by landline (800) and cell phone (405, including 126 who had no landline telephone) were carried out in English and Spanish. The margin of sampling error for the total sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points. For results based on
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