61% Of Americans Prefer Taxing The Rich Over Tax Health Insurance

CNN has a new poll out showing that a large majority of Americans prefer the House's plan of taxing the rich to pay for health care reform:

According to the poll, 61 percent of the public favor the House provision, which taxes people with high incomes regardless of the kind of health insurance they have. Twenty-nine percent favor the Senate provision, which raises taxes on high-quality health insurance plans, regardless of the amount of money made by the people covered by those plans.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Taxing people's health care benefits is very unpopular. There is a reason that Obama campaigned directly against the proposal, and attacked John McCain for supporting the idea. Taxing the rich is a much more popular way to pay for health care. That is why the House did it, and why Obama campaigned on the idea before flip-flopping after getting into office.

Health care reform keeps getting more unpopular each day. I suspect it is because as time goes on, the most popular elements (like the public option and employer mandate) get eliminated, while the least popular elements (like the excise tax and individual mandate) are declared “must haves” by the President.

Amazing! When you take away popular policies, and replace them with unpopular policies, the whole bill becomes less popular. Who could have guessed?