New poll suggests Americans believe health reform could make problems worse

USA Today reports that a new polls suggests some Americans believe President Obama's efforts to overhaul the health care system could actually make the system's problems worse.

"A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken after the president's dramatic address to a joint session of Congress last week shows Americans almost evenly divided over passing a health care bill and inclined to think it would make some of the system's vexing problems worse, not better."

Fifty percent of people want their member of Congress to vote for a health care bill, the poll reports, while 47 do not, but 60 percent say the plan will not accomplish Obama's goals. "The president's speech apparently failed to galvanize public opinion in the way the White House had hoped. While it drew a national television audience estimated by Nielsen at more than 32 million people, there's little evidence in the survey that it changed minds" (Page, 9/15).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.