Cui Bono?

by digby

Boy, this sure would have been useful information for the Democrats to use if they’d ever really tried to sell health care reform instead of assuming that Obama’s election made it self-evident that anything the administration decided to do was inevitable:

Who Supports Health Reform?

David W. Brady, Stanford University
Daniel P. Kessler, Stanford University

ABSTRACT
In this article, we report results from a new study that surveyed a large, national sample of American adults about their willingness to pay for health reform. As in previous work, we find that self-identified Republicans, older Americans, and high-income Americans are less supportive of reform. However, these basic findings mask three important features of public opinion. First, income has a substantial effect on support for reform, even holding political affiliation constant. Indeed, income is the most important determinant of support for reform. Second, the negative effects of income on support for reform begin early in the income distribution, at annual family income levels of $25,000 to $50,000. Third, although older Americans have a less favorable view of reform than the young, much of their opposition is due to dislike of large policy changes than to reform per se.

This bears out the pervasive “conservative” American ethos of “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” so the problem is much bigger than health care reform. The idea that anyone could fall victim to negative circumstance or make a bad decision or just find themselves on the losing side of something is attributed to their own bad character — or, perversely, to the government which has taken from you, the deserving citizen, and given it to someone else, thus unfairly placing you at a disadvantage. It’s old style Calvinism mixed with adolescent Randism and it’s a very serious problem for people who believe that social stability and economic justice are important.

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