Obama's health care reform less popular than Bill Clinton's '94 proposal

Washington, Aug. 28 (ANI): Americans are more sceptical about President Barack Obama's health care reform than they were about Bill Clinton's health care proposals in 1994, a survey conducted by a Republican polling firm has found.

Thirty seven percent of Americans are opposed to the Obama plan compared with 25 percent who favor it, a poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies shows.

In June of 1994 - just a few months before a White House-led health care reform push effectively died on Capitol Hill - 35 percent of Americans said they opposed the Clinton administration's plan while 23 percent favored it, Politico cited a survey conducted by the same firm, as saying.

But in 1994 as well as now, the polls showed that large numbers of Americans remain undecided about health care reform.

At that time, 42 percent of those surveyed said they had no opinion about Clinton's plan and this August, 37 percent also had no opinion about Obama's proposal.

The recent Public Opinion Strategies Poll surveyed 800 registered voters Aug. 11-13 and has a 3.5 percentage point margin of error.

The poll asked about Obama's plan, but in reality, there are several versions of health care reform currently working their way through Congress.

Bill McInturff, a partner at the firm who poll-tested the "Harry and Louise" advertising campaign that played a key role in the defeat of the Clinton administration's health care reform efforts in the 1990s, said that opposition to the Obama plan has been fuelled, in part, by the notion that "government has gotten way too big and is going way too far."

McInturff also predicted that the death of Senator Ted Kennedy would not have much of a practical impact on the health care debate.

"Individual members will make those votes based on their own calculus, for their own situation and not as a memorial to his long and distinguished career," McInturff said. (ANI)