How Would Health Reform Help You?

Ezra Klein points to a new Kaiser Family Foundation article by Drew Altman showing that people who currently have insurance believe that health reform would also help them as well as helping the uninsured.  He writes,

The salient fact about health insurance in the United States is not that 15 percent don't have it. It's that 85 percent do. . . .  "Look," one of the President's senior health advisers said to me earlier this week, "95 percent of the people who voted for Obama had health insurance. We need to think about what we're doing for them."

That's why the first three health care principles in Obama's budget speak to the concerns of the insured: Choice, affordability, security. But In his latest column at the Kaiser Family Foundation, Drew Altman suggests a metric we should we be watching to see if they're successful. Polls, he notes, generally ask whether you think health reform will make your family better off. Kaiser recently ran one such survey and the results were moderately encouraging . . . [59% said that nation would be better off with health reform and 38% said that they would be better off]

Altman notes that these numbers are better than anything Clinton enjoyed. . . .