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by C. William Chattin
The incongruity between how Americans’ regard their own health care and how they perceive everyone else’s health care is perhaps the greatest disparity between perception and reality of all major “political issues.” A joint survey conducted by ABC News, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the USA Today found that only “44% of adults said they were satisfied with the quality of health care in the U.S.,” but that “89% said they were satisfied with the quality of their own health care.”
In other words, 9 out of 10 Americans think their own health care is good, but a full half of those people think everyone else’s health care is bad. Why the discord? Cue the leftwing, biased, “do-something/do-anything” media.
In all seriousness, perhaps the biggest problem of bias with the media is not leftwingism, but an inherent, self-serving predisposition in favor of “doing something.” “Doing something” equals news, attention to the media, and ratings. “Doing nothing” means Americans won’t spend time watching television reports or reading the paper.
As the relentlessly optimistic Larry Kudlow observed this morning, once the number of (47 million) uninsured Americans is adjusted for college students, people earning $75,000 or more who chose not to have insurance, non-U.S. citizens, and individuals eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but have not signed up for some reason, the total number of uninsured Americans is really between 10 million and 15 million people.
That is not to say that we shouldn’t carry about those 10 to 15 million people. But, it’s important to note that they represent only 3% to 5% of all Americans. Before the entire health care system is overhauled, perhaps most Americans should be told that 9 out of 10 Americans are satisfied with their own health care, and only 1 in 20 Americans is truly without health care insurance because he/she can’t afford it.
