from MEDIA MATTERS

On the August 7 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Sean Hannity answered Alan Colmes’ question, “Most people want national health care. Don’t they?” with a flat “No.” Colmes said he wanted guest Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, to answer his question. Luntz did not answer whether the public wanted “national health care,” instead claiming that people want “control. What they want is the ability to determine their doctor, their hospital, their pharmaceutical plan, and their insurance company.” In fact, polling from May and June found that a majority of the public wants a national health insurance program. Moreover, one of those polls, conducted by a Democratic polling firm, found that a majority of likely voters favored universal health insurance even if it limited choices among health care providers.

Several polls taken in May and June found that a majority of respondents favored a government program to provide health insurance to all Americans:

* In a May 4-6 CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, 64 percent of respondents said they “think the government should provide a national health insurance program for all Americans, even if this would require higher taxes.”

* In a May 31-June 5 poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for the Kaiser Family Foundation, 53 percent of respondents said they wanted a presidential candidate to propose “a new health plan that would make a major effort to provide health insurance for all or nearly all of the uninsured,” even if it “would involve a substantial increase in spending,” in contrast with 21 percent in favor of a “new health plan that is more limited and would cover only some groups of the uninsured BUT would involve less new spending” and 17 percent in favor of “[k]eeping things basically as they are.”

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