ain't there nothing I can take to relieve this bellyache?

I FREAKING CALLED IT!

I'm trying not to brag here, but I've been saying for MONTHS that the polling on health care reform has been absolutely fucked. The standard question has always been some variation on "Do you approve of the health care reform plan currently being considered in Congress?", and the results of these polls are always, always, ALWAYS below 50%, sometimes even below 40%, numbers that the conservative portion of the media have been repeating ad nauseum. It's always "The Obama administration is shoving this down our throats" or "America doesn't want this" or "Government takeover of health care is being rejected by the American people."

However, they're missing a large portion of the story; namely, that I don't approve of the health care reform plan currently being considering in Congress. Why?

• It's not single-payer.
• It perpetuates the expensive and inefficient system of employer-provided insurance.
• The public option in the House bill is completely weaksauce. Not only is it opt-out, it's not tied to Medicare rates and would only cover a small portion of the uninsured. Everything that makes the public option a good idea has been stripped out because it's not powerful enough to provide real competition and drive down costs.
• Despite there not being an affordable public alternative, there's still an individual mandate.
• The Stupak amendment, barring abortion services from any plans that receive any federal funds, arbitrarily forcing the entire cost of a legal medical procedure onto women who need federal subsidies and therefore are least able to afford abortions. Unless they buy separate abortion insurance. But who the hell plans on getting an abortion?

So yeah, I don't approve of the legislation, but in the polling my opinion is lumped in with all the dumbasses who think Obama wants to kill Grandma and ration care just for the hell of it. I'd still rather have the legislation than not have it - the Senate version has some surprisingly good cost-containment measures, Medicare will have a lot of waste stripped from it, the deficit-reduction is nice and in general it's pushing us in the right direction. And I feel like a lot of liberals/progressives must feel the same way, something that is not reflected in a overly simple yes/no poll.

Until now. Once again, FiveThirtyEight proves itself to be an extremely valuable resource:

Ipsos...did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn't go far enough?

It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan -- or about 12 of the overall sample -- did so from the left; they thought the plan didn't go far enough.

Ipsos also asked a parallel question of people who supported the plan: did any of them support the plan because they oppose health care reform and thought that the plan was sufficiently watered-down so as to "keep health care reform from happening"? A small number of people picked this response: about 10 percent of those in favor of the plan, or 3 percent of the entire sample.

One way to look at this: 43 percent of people favor health care reform, whereas 38 percent oppose it (20 percent are undecided). But the actual plan under consideration gets numbers that are more or less the reverse of that -- 34 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed -- because a significant number of people think the plan doesn't go far enough.

This development really needs to become part of the broader health care discussion. Tell your friends.