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(This post expands on comments I originally made here.)

A couple of weeks ago on Bill Moyers’ Journal, Kathleen Hall Jamieson made a point we don’t hear often enough:

Unless you start by asking the public in a poll what they know, what the baseline level of knowledge is, it doesn’t matter what the public thinks ultimately about a piece of legislation or not because you can be reflecting uninformed public opinion.

Those of us who’ve questioned the frequent invocations of high public support for “the public option” have been hammering this point ad nauseum. And now an AARP-sponsored poll released last week drives home the degree to which most people have no clue as to the actual nature of the public option on offer in current legislation.

As the scrupulous political weathervane Nate Silver reports, the poll finds that only 37% of respondents (and only 41% of Democrats) could distinguish an accurate description of an HR 3200-style public option from British-style socialized medicine, regional co-ops, or don’t-know. Indeed, almost a quarter of Democrats equated the public option with the British system.
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Silver notes that elsewhere in the poll, to gauge support for the public option, the pollsters used a different, inaccurate, definition: “Starting a new federal health insurance plan that individuals could purchase if they can’t afford private plans offered to them.” Silver writes:

Seventy-nine percent of the poll’s respondents — including 61 percent of Republicans — say they’d support this proposal. But it seems to be a very different proposal from the "public option" that Penn, Schoen and Berland took so much care to define, or the one that is actually being debated before Congress. Rather than offering health insurance at "market rates", the public option has been transformed in this question into a sort of fallback policy for people who are priced out of the market. Moreover, the term "government" has been replaced by the softer but more ambiguous term "federal".

As a commenter to Silver’s article noted, describing the public option as “government funded” may be partly accurate, but an even more precise definition of the public option in current legislation would be “a non-profit insurance plan set up by the government but funded by premiums paid by policy holders.” How many more people would have gotten the answer wrong had this even more accurate definition been used and instead of the British system, the pollsters had swapped in “a government insurance system like Medicare freely available to all Americans under 65” (ie, Howard Dean’s disingenuous depiction)?

Meanwhile, multiple polls, worded in multiple ways, have shown that a majority of Americans support universal national health insurance set up and funded like Medicare. Unlike polls asking about the public option, we can feel more confident that the respondents, having at worst one degree of separation from Medicare itself, had a decent clue as to what they were voicing support for.

As Silver points out, the AARP-sponsored poll was internet-based, and so its precision is highly suspect. However, with regard to questions of knowledge as opposed to opinion, this most likely skewed the poll in the direction of more, rather than fewer, correct responses. After all, the sampling was restricted to people capable of turning on their computers, finding the internet, scrolling and clicking through multiple questions and responses, and hitting the “Submit” button. That automatically weeds out a portion of Americans with no fighting chance of educating themselves about health care reform through non-mainstream media.

I’m not putting this out as, necessarily, an argument against advocating for Obamacare in its current incarnations. However, these findings serve as a warning of the resentment likely to arise should the public option, as currently crafted, come into being and smash headlong into the public’s raised expectations.