So, Timothy Noah, your advocacy of the "public option" is basically a pitch for another medical entitlement, a sort of medicare for younger folks? Why don't you just straightforwardly advocate such, instead of obfuscating?

"Government provided medical care for low income people, paid for by the taxpayers".

Why not just cut the BS?

Because liberals know that the majority of people in this country don't want single payer healthcare. If the American people wanted single payer healthcare then we would be hearing about the bill in Congress that is going to easily pass and provide single payer healthcare for everyone. That's not the case so we get "The Public Option" to get the foot in the door.

Its called compromise. We on the left want a single payer system but realize that it doesn't have the support to make it through, so we're willing to accept a more moderate position. That compromise has wide support- usually around 58%, but according to this article as much as 72%.

Yes, the majority of Americans want the Public Option, so I guess you can say we, the majority of Americans, also want single payer but are willing to accept a partial compromise in getting there. What liberals KNOW is that the Senate is a consensus operation, in which a rich industry like that of the Insurance Vampires can buy itself a lot of immunity, as indeed they have. Liberals, along with lots of other people, don't like this.

I bet the actual results of a poll depend greatly on how you frame the question.

The number is probably about 60-70% for a public option if you framed it "Do you favor low cost government-backed or government-ran insurance available to everyone?"

The number probably drops to around 30-40% if you added "even if it mean your company switching to this option, which may entail delays to your health care service or additional fees and taxes for those who can afford them".

So basically, moreso than probably most issues, you would have to look very closely at who conducted and paid for the poll and look at the entire string of questions asked to get any worthwhile data out of any health care poll.

you make a valid point but if you actually do look at the questions and the data i.e. the wall street journal (hardly a liberal leaning organization)/nbc poll you will find the question was asked in a number of ways and no matter how they ask it, a large majority of americans support a public option of one sort or another.

it is the biased conservative media that skews its questions to match their market.

here is the link to that poll.

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Poll has 100 participants. All have a cell phone but no land line whioch would suggest they are more likely to be renters. Less likey to own a home and have a high paying job. Are less likesly to already have health insurance. Less carining about who(someone else) is going to pay for their care.

Let me walk around my neighborhood of high priced homes with land lines and ask how they feel about the public option . Iwill have to wait until 6-7pm because most will be a WORK until then.

do that ckone in the meantime you might learn how read information.

over 1000 were interviewed (which is standard in the field) and out of that 1039 they also interviewed 100 who only had cell phones.

that is why conservatives are always so ill-informed, they just don't seem to do well with factual data.

I don't think you understand your own cited poll there. From my reading it looks like they interviewed far more than 1000 people, keeping only the 1000 who were cell-phone only users. Frankly, that's more than a little suspect. There's been a lot of data showing that cell-phone only users skew younger. They also tend to be transient, to be renters, etc. Unless there is a good reason to exclude those with landlines, this looks like a classic case of flawed polling. Polling meant to produce an effect rather than report on one.

For instance, if I did an identical poll but decided to throw out everyone with a cell-phone only, that would be suspect, right? If I threw out everyone without just a landline I would get a population filled with older people on average. If I then asked them questions about the public option, I could claim that it shows america is dead set against it.

So ckone: do you really think that renters don't work? How do you think they pay the rent, taxes, etc? Are renters a lower form of life because they don't yet own a home? Often renters pay as much as, or more than, homeowners pay per month on their mortgages, etc. And they're often younger, as you say, and so many of them haven't gotten the money together yet to make a down payment on a house, or the credit history, etc., but in the meantime, they're paying quite a bit per month to rent.