2020 Polling Takes Shape

The new CNN poll of 2020 Democratic candidates, first to follow the first debates, is so startling that you think it has to represent something serious, in the trends at the top:

The fall of Biden and Sanders (the former from runaway leader to just leader and the latter from 2nd to 4th place) and concomitant rise of Harris and Warren better than doubling their previous numbers looks an awful lot like a trend, though you can't really say it is, even if it's the way you'd like to see things going, which (disclosure!) it is for me. (It's also of some interest that it looks so bad for people down in the middle of nowhere who looked good in debate, from Buttigieg to Gabbard, and especially Julián Castro, who seem to be bleeding support that barely existed in the first place.)

I wonder if it's OK at this point at something that's not changing, but possibly starting to clarify itself, on health care, the evidence that voters generally want something as radical as the Sanders Medicare For All program and the continuing existence of private health insurance at the same time.

The poll finds most Americans in favor of a national health insurance plan, even if that means taxes go up (56% favor that), and support for such a plan skyrockets among potential Democratic voters (85% back it). But those who favor such a plan are not all on board with it being a total replacement for private insurance. Among all adults, just 21% say they favor national health insurance and that it should completely replace private health insurance. Among potential Democratic voters, just 30% feel that way.

I'd like to suggest that this isn't some kind of paradox or ill-informed confusion of categories, but actually fairly precisely what they mean to say.

That is to say: a lot of us out here in commentary-land have particular, relatively specific models they like to push, after a particular country (France for me, Canada for Bernie, etc.) or a particular theorist, but I bet the majority of voters are not thinking that way but, more intelligently, of how they'd like to see the healthcare system work, whatever system it might be, from the end-user standpoint. Which is the opposite of stupid!

They'd like to be free of the hassle we get in the US at the point of service, emotional and financial, of haggling about insurance and shelling out cash we don't have. They'd like to not make copays. They don't mind paying, at all, but they like it to be in a progressive fashion, where those who have more pay more, and in some kind of actuarial fashion, as insurance, whether through premiums as with the private insurance company or taxes as with Social Security or something that is a bit or a lot of both, and in that kind of regularly scheduled, predictable-amount, form. They want less stress, and less of a chance of bankruptcy, and they don't want too much unfamiliarity—that, I think, is what the private insurance is about. They want you professionals who know how it's done to figure it out please, and spare us the details for not.

In fact, they'd like the system we have without the copays and the surprise bills, or something that feels like that. And some kind of public option, or more than one kind, to force real competition (Senator Warren loves real competition and breaking up monopolies) and maybe put the private monster companies out of business.

What best satisfies the mood, maybe, is Obamacare made more the way it already is, with fewer copays beyond the Ten Essential Services (everybody likes those getting 100% paid for), and fairer subsidies, and cheaper drugs, and true universality, and that's the message they've been trying to send to the pollsters. Just a thought.