The New York Times
August 5, 2001
by Robin Toner
“Robert J. Blendon, a professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the public is closely divided on whether the government is doing too much or too little. But on Medicare, it’s not a close call, particularly among the elderly.”
Comment: Dr. Blendon and others have demonstrated that Americans have accepted the rhetoric that we do not want the government involved in our affairs. In fact, Dr. Blendon’s polls, produced jointly with The Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation, have been used in Washington to dismiss discussion of universal, publicly administered insurance. But now, Dr. Blendon separates rhetoric from reality. The public emphatically supports publicly administered insurance in the form of Medicare, albeit for a segment of our population. We Americans may be protective of our rhetoric, but, we’ll always dismiss rhetoric in favor of the reality of health care security once we have it.