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Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Dubious polls often serve devious goals
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The numbers are, quite frankly, overwhelming.
The depth of knowledge expressed by ordinary Georgians about a public policy issue now being debated in Congress is breathtaking. Such are the findings of a University of Georgia Survey Research Center poll conducted for an advocacy group funded as a condition of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia’s 1996 conversion to a for-profit company. About 20 percent of the stock, then amounting to $80 million, was set aside in the Healthcare Georgia Foundation to help increase “access to primary health care and preventive services for underserved individuals and communities.”
The poll, released last week, purports to show that two-thirds of Georgians think the “state doesn’t spend enough on health care,” according to headlines. While it’s doubtful that one Georgian in a thousand could come within $50 million of guessing the amount spent on PeachCare ($385 million), they are overwhelmingly united in stating an opinion that supports the sponsor’s agenda.
The findings of the survey are simply astounding — and surely dramatic enough to intimidate any Georgia state legislator who might be tempted to rein in out-of-control spending for PeachCare. That’s a 10-year-old program that provides taxpayer-subsidized health care coverage for children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, a program to serve the poor. PeachCare was projected to run out of money in Georgia this year, requiring an immediate $81 million infusion in this year’s supplemental budget.
House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) offered a bill that wouldn’t affect anybody now enrolled legally in PeachCare, but would modestly curtail future spending. As passed the Senate, the bill would actually increase spending.
It is an emotional debate, both in Georgia and in Congress. While the program didn’t exist at all a decade ago, its supporters present it now as something that will cause death, school failure and calamity on the scale of Al Gore’s global warming if benefits are curtailed so much as a dime.
The survey conducted by UGA pollsters under contract to the Healthcare Georgia Foundation utilized questions drawn from similar polling for another advocacy group, the New England Alliance for Children’s Health in Boston. In the UGA survey, 100 percent said PeachCare funding should be kept at the same level, given more money or given enough funding to cover current members. Fully 80 percent favor expanding it.
Walk into any coffee shop anywhere in Georgia and ask any question that requires knowledge of PeachCare’s funding level or of the public policy issue being debated and you’re likely to draw blank looks. And yet 500 Georgians who picked up the telephone did.
What to conclude? Clearly the issue has to be framed for respondents. And it was. While the reported sample was 500, it was drawn from 2,166 and had a cooperation rate of 37.4 percent, according to Research Center Director James S. Bason. So when the client interprets results as “a message to legislators that people don’t want this program cut, that it works” some context is needed.
For one, those who participated were given a premise. “PeachCare for Kids is a state program that provides low-cost health care coverage to children in low-income working families, whose parents can’t afford insurance and do not get insurance from their employers,” the survey-takers said. “The program is run by the state, and costs are shared by the federal and state governments. Parents share the cost by paying monthly premiums for their children’s health insurance.”
Loaded words and phrases aside, that’s not an entirely factual statement. The Congressional Budget Office found that for every 100 children enrolled, “there is a corresponding reduction in private coverage of between 25 and 50 children.” Obviously some parents could afford and some employers did provide health insurance, but parents chose the taxpayer-subsidized alternative as cheaper and better.
If given any number of other facts — that, for example, citizenship and income weren’t verified, and that in recent weeks a quarter-horse had been signed up, or that benefits were more generous than those provided state employees — responses undoubtedly would have been different.
Polls and studies undertaken to influence policy and public opinion are often described as “nonpartisan” or coming from “nonprofit” organizations or foundations. That is not the same as saying they are unbiased.
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