Public opinion on health care reform in the United States - Research Paper Example

There have been many efforts to impose some kind of health care reform in the United States, and the aim of this essay is to examine the public opinion of the most recent effort by current President, Barack Obama, to change the way the system works in the US. The hypothesis is that most people asked, using a short survey written on the Qualtrics system, would have a favorable opinion of the current reforms suggested, particularly in regards to the reform of the private health insurance market and aiding those with long-term chronic conditions in qualifying for affordable health insurance policies.

This topic is particularly important because healthcare is something that is required by every individual at some point in their lives, and thus this issue affects everyone in the United States. It is also particularly timely because of the current economic recession (Blendon and Benson, “Public Opinion, the Deep Recession”, 2010), meaning that health insurance premiums are out of reach for more people than ever. This is part of the reason why we have hypothesized that the public opinion will be generally positive concerning this issue.

Existing research on the topic has suggested that people are of generally mixed views about the reforms. We can see from evidence provided by Zis, Jacobs and Shapiro (1996) that showed public opinion on healthcare before the reforms were suggested that is particularly difficult to find a common ground between politicians and the public on this issue. More recent research suggests that public opinion on the specifics of the healthcare system as proposed by and passed by Obama are mixed (Blendon and Benson, “Public Opinion at the Time”, 2010).

This is also shown in evidence from Gelman, Lee and Ghitza (2010). This article goes on to state that the majority of reform opposition comes from those within a higher income bracket and those over 65. This has led to the formation of the third hypothesis being tested by this questionnaire. This research proposes that it will in fact be those over the age of 40 that will be more opposed to the healthcare reforms, although the age responses will be grouped to allow us to see if this statement will back up Gelman, Lee and Ghitza (2010).

The first hypothesis will be testing the current thought in research that people have mixed views on the topic of healthcare reform. Existing research has also shown that people are in agreement with some of the pieces of the healthcare reform, and it is as a whole that it causes controversy (Brodie et al., 2010). This research covered the topic from a more historical perspective and additionally used information from those leaving the polling stations. This meant that people were more likely to be volatile in the opinions they expressed.

The theory put forward by this research is that people are generally happy with certain aspects of the reform, and the questionnaire will question the opinion of people on the specific topic of extending Medicaid coverage to test this theory. Finally, there has been a lot of research on whether the healthcare reforms benefit certain ethnic groups and as such they show a more positive response to the laws, for example the work by Tesler and Sears (2010). This has been widely debated and as such is not a gap in the research and will not be included in the hypotheses.

The three testable hypotheses are, then: 1. Individuals questioned will generally express positive views (as indicated by the