Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Poll number 2: Only 39 percent believe insurance plans should cover contraceptives
Posted by Charles Maldonado on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 11:06 AM
Yesterday, we saw this survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that a majority of respondents — particularly Catholic respondents — believe that employers in general should provide insurance that includes birth control coverage. 49 percent (and 52 percent of Catholics) said they believe that certain religious-affiliated institutions like colleges and hospitals should be required to provide contraceptive coverage, as the federal government says it will (sooner or later) require them to do.
Now, we have this poll, from Rasmussen Reports, whose findings are quite different. The Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely voters found that only 39 percent of respondents backed the federal requirement. Why the disparity?
Well, let's look at the wording of the questions. PRRI asked it this way:
There is currently a debate over what kinds of health care plans some religious organizations should be required to provide. Do you think [INSERT; RANDOMIZE] should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception or birth control at no cost, or not? What about [INSERT]?
Rasmussen, however, put it this way:
The requirement to provide contraceptives for women violates deeply held beliefs of some churches and religious organizations. If providing such coverage violates the beliefs of a church or religious organization, should the government still require them to provide coverage for contraceptives?
(Continued after the jump)
Let's get it out of the way that PRRI is often criticized by conservatives for being left-leaning, while Rasmussen is criticized by liberals for being right-leaning. Fine.
Now, there's the fact that the Rasmussen question takes pains to say that the requirement "violates deeply held beliefs" of churches and religious institutions, while PRRI glosses that over with "there is currently a debate ... ." They're both being manipulative — PRRI a little less so —but even that's irrelevant to why Rasmussen's question is deeply flawed.
In PRRI's question, there are two categories of "religious institutions." One is hospitals, colleges and other institutions that are not solely, or even mostly, dedicated to religious practice and serve the entire community, regardless of religion. The other category is places of worship.
Rasmussen, on the other hand, puts them all together. That's problematic because the actual debate here has nothing to do with places of worship or religious bureaucracies. Even in PRRI's poll, 57 percent of respondents said they didn't believe that churches/synagogues/etc. should be required to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees. Which is fine because those are already exempt from the requirement. Yet Rasmussen's question implies that they won't be, lumping all "religious organizations" into one bullshit highly questionable category.
Comments (1)
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I think you've got this one backwards. The Rasmussen Poll is more relevant to the politics of this issue because the people who object to this policy will frame the debate exactly the way Rasmussen phrases the question.
Of course, the polling is kind of meaningless, anyway. The fact of the matter is that it's a tiny percentage of employers who would opt out of making available a plan covering contraception even with no mandate. This mandate targets a miniscule number of organizations. The only people who really care if Ave Maria University and similar very Catholic institutions provide contraception coverage are the people who work for them or support them, and those people are overwhelmingly against the mandate... and unlike the average person who has no idea who these institutions are, these people actually care enough about the issue for it to be a source of motivation for political action.
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