Partisan differences and the 'public option'
I thought it would be interesting to look at historical patterns in partisan attitudes to government-sponsored health insurance. I looked at responses to the American National Election Survey question on self-placement on a seven-point scale, where a 'one' indicates the respondent favors an entirely government-run health insurance system, while a seven indicates the respondent supports only private health insurance.
What I found is that Americans, regardless of party identification, generally favor a mixture of both private and government health insurance. To be sure, Republicans are more favorable of private plans and Democrats more in favor of a government plan (with Independents somewhere in the middle), but there is surprisingly not a great deal of difference between the parties.
The first of the two graphs shows the mean value for members of each party, along with 'Independents' (N.B., 'leaners' were coded as partisans) on the seven-point ANES scale. What we see is a strong degree of consistency in attitude, especially among Democrats and Independents. Starting in the early 1990s Republicans became less favorable to the so-called 'public option', although this trend seems to have stopped to a large degree.
What I found is that Americans, regardless of party identification, generally favor a mixture of both private and government health insurance. To be sure, Republicans are more favorable of private plans and Democrats more in favor of a government plan (with Independents somewhere in the middle), but there is surprisingly not a great deal of difference between the parties.
The first of the two graphs shows the mean value for members of each party, along with 'Independents' (N.B., 'leaners' were coded as partisans) on the seven-point ANES scale. What we see is a strong degree of consistency in attitude, especially among Democrats and Independents. Starting in the early 1990s Republicans became less favorable to the so-called 'public option', although this trend seems to have stopped to a large degree.
The second graph shows the differences in mean position for each of the three groups. For example, the red line shows the mean difference in opinion between Republicans and Democrats. Two things are immediately notable:
- The differences in the average position between Democrats and Republicans has grown larger over time and continues to do so. The average difference between Democrats and Republicans during the 1970s was roughly one point on the ANES scale. In the 30 years between 1978 and 2008 it doubled. Clearly the divide between partisans, not party elites, has increased and in today's partisan environment, will probably continue to increase. This divide might help explain the seemingly great animosity between sided on the health care reform issue.
- The difference between Democrats and Independents was much greater in 2008 than in 1992. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned on health care reform, and on some sort of government-provided health care ('socialized medicine', if you will) as important parts of the platform. For each it was the dominant focus of their freshman year legislative agenda. Yet Obama was successful while Clinton was not. Why? One answer might be that the Democrats have larger majorities now than they had in 1992. Another reason might be that Democrats are now much more ideologically similar than they were in 1992, largely caused by the 1994 Congressional election all but decimating the Democratic Southern Caucus.
