Americans seem to hate the forest but love the trees. No matter the issue, Americans have no problem decrying a system as a whole but expressing undying loyalty to their small part in it. Turn on any talk radio show and you’ll hear someone railing against
Americans seem to hate the forest but love the trees. No matter the issue, Americans have no problem decrying a system as a whole but expressing undying loyalty to their small part in it. Turn on any talk radio show and you’ll hear someone railing against lazy teachers and disinterested administrators in public schools in general but turn right around and claim their kid’s school is the best in the county. Congress’s overall approval level has been lower than 40 percent for almost a year yet many people will swear to you that their congressperson is the only prince in a den of thieves. It’s this curious contradiction in American attitudes that explains why President Obama is losing ground on the healthcare debate: Americans all agree that our healthcare system needs to be fixed, but too many people are satisfied with their own healthcare for anything radical to really get done.
According to a recent Rasmussen poll, only 35 percent of Americans rate the healthcare system as good or excellent, but amongst those that actually have healthcare, 70 percent rate their personal coverage as good to excellent. That is followed by a recent Pew Charitable Trusts poll showing that only 25 percent of Americans are even paying that “close” attention to the healthcare debate. How can these attitudes exist simultaneously across so much of the United States? Easily because the core of the healthcare debate is pitting the haves versus the have-nots even though neither side necessarily knows they’re playing for that team.
The majority of Americans are healthy and the majority of Americans still have jobs. Yes, many of us feel we could lose a few extra pounds here and there, or your lower back acts up when you play intramural basketball at work, but by and large Americans feel pretty healthy. What’s more, healthcare in the United States is usually linked to employment. If you have a job, you have healthcare. You may not think your provider is the greatest, but since most people are healthy they don’t think about their healthcare plan much as long as they know they have one. If the paragraph above describes you, you’re one of the haves, and you probably aren’t paying that much attention to the healthcare debate. And when you do, you’re seeing scary commercials run by the healthcare industry telling you that Obama wants socialism and that a national healthcare plan is going to be like a Saturday afternoon at the DMV–long waits, bad service and general incompetence.
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