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    martha-burk

    Martha Burk

    Pollster Celinda Lake: Where Women Really Stand on Health Care

    Posted:
    11/21/09
    Filed Under:Senate, House, Abortion, Health Care, Polls
    51 Comments  + 
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    Women's groups expressed dismay on November 7 when the House passed a health care bill with unprecedented abortion restrictions. The Stupak-Pitts amendment prohibits any health plan participating in the proposed nationwide exchange from offering abortion coverage, meaning virtually all plans. The initial alarm has now turned to anger and mobilized a backlash against Democrats who voted for the amendment, along with a nationwide push to keep the restrictions out of the upcoming Senate bill.
    With the full Senate tackling the legislation this weekend, I thought it was a good time to have a conversation with Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research. She is the nation's premier Democratic pollster on issues affecting women, and has her fingers on the pulse of Washington groups and grassroots women alike.
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    Martha Burk: The whole conversation on health care in Washington right now is about the abortion vote in the House.
    Celinda Lake: A lot of it is. In particular, people are debating how much this widens abortion restrictions in general. And it is raising more fundamental questions about the administration. There's been a shift from a feeling that this was an administration that guaranteed more reproductive choice, and now it's an administration saying, well, we didn't mean to change the status quo.
    But the status quo is unacceptable. The status quo denies abortions to women in the military, women in D.C., women in prison, and it includes the Hyde amendment prohibiting federal abortion funding in Medicaid. And of course that is accompanied by the Senate Finance Committee vote to restore the tremendously disproportionate funding of abstinence-only sex education in the schools [previously cut by the Obama budget]. And the administration did not object. These things are bringing into focus that there is a fundamental disconnect here, and people are wondering what the commitment is to reproductive choice.
    MB: Is that the trouble – whatever Congress does to women, the administration seems to be fine with it?
    CL: Well, I think it says more than that. I think it says -- and this is the concern of the women's groups -- that by virtue of standing on the sidelines, you're communicating to people that you're going to be willing to make deals -- and these things shouldn't be negotiable, particularly for an administration that guaranteed women's reproductive health choices. So it's more sinister. The silence isn't just neutral – it's creating a situation where measures like the Stupak amendment can pass, and abstinence-only funding can continue. The administration has to say no, I'm not for these things.
    MB: Have you done any polling on the abortion issue, or are you mainly speaking about client groups you're working with, or both?
    CL: I'm talking about mainly client groups I'm working with. We haven't polled since the amendment passed on the abortion issue. We had done a lot of polling on abstinence-only, and the public is not in favor of it. People think we also need birth control and information on sexually transmitted disease. They say "We have to be realistic here. It would be great if we could start with abstinence, but we can't stop with abstinence."
    And in terms of our earlier polling on abortion and health care, what we said at the time was that voters were OK with the message that the proposed overhaul does nothing to change the current law on abortion. But now that's not the truth. This amendment does dramatically change the current law on abortion. And the likelihood of finding alternative coverage for abortion is really quite absurd. You don't plan to have an unintended pregnancy, by definition.
    MB: In terms of wanting some kind of change, up until this Stupak-Pitts amendment passed, were women as much, more, or about the same as men in support of reform?
    CL: Eighty percent of voters rating health care as their most important issue, and 80 percent of health care decision-makers -- those who say "I make the decisions on health care for my family" -- are women. So women from day one have been more mobilized, more intense, more attentive to the health care issue. They've also been more supportive of health care reform, for a variety of reasons. One, they vote the issue more; two, they're more Democratic; and three, they tend to have more dissatisfaction with the current system. At the same time, women are more nervous about reform than men. They're very worried about quality, about the scarcity of doctors with 44 million new people getting insurance. Women have also raised more questions about the impact on Medicare.
    MB: And what about Medicaid, do people address that at all?
    CL: No, not even focused on it. The children's advocacy groups are focused on the fact that the new children's provisions could be less generous than the State Children's Health Insurance Program and Medicaid are today. The public would be adamantly against that. But they assume any new health care reform would offer more, not less. The message that it could be less generous really hasn't broken through.
    MB: I know there have been some recent polls that show more people identify as pro-life than pro-choice.
    CL: First of all, you have more people now, and a steady increase of people saying pro-life over pro-choice. I think it's a very interesting question why that's happened. Always when we've had a Democratic or pro-choice president elected, we've seen some receding on the pro-choice dimension, because pro-choice people feel like it's taken care of, and they don't have to worry about it. At the same time, pro-lifers are very energized. But the erosion right now is beyond that effect. The honest answer is that we don't know exactly what's going on -- whether this is a change in attitudes, or semantics, or what.
    MB: Do you think that if this amendment stays in the bill, more people will turn against health care reform altogether, or will they just say "Oh well that's what had to happen and we just have to go with it?"
    CL: In terms of the bill, I don't think people will turn against it so much, because the very people that are the most pro-choice are also the most in favor of health care reform. I think what will happen is that they will turn against the politicians who allowed Stupak to pass.
    MB: So it will play out at the ballot box.
    CL: Right -- I think it has the potential to do that. And it has really energized women to get going on keeping the Stupak provisions out of any bill in the Senate.
    MB: Speaking of the elections, do you think the Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey this month played into the Stupak amendment vote at all?
    CL: Not really. But if they did, the politicians learned the wrong lesson -- because the votes were not particularly anti-Democrat or pro-Republican. The votes were anti-status quo.
    MB: So, if elected representatives and candidates think they need to go further to the right, that's the wrong message?
    CL: Going to the right is not the lesson. No. It's more one of "You need to get going and do something" about voter concerns.
    MB: Neither Obama nor his press secretary reinforced his pre-election positions on reproductive choice after the Stupak vote.
    CL: That's really the point here. Women are saying, "Wait a minute. You made a commitment." And there's a pattern that's starting to emerge, reflected in Obama's statement "this is not an abortion bill, but a health care bill." Well, okay, but women are wondering "Is that your best shot?"



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