The only poll that's going to matter:

To control the costs of Medicare would you prefer a voucher to obtain private insurance or a have a permanent government panel determine how to ration care?

The House GOP passed the Ryan plan precisely because they knew it would never be enacted. Political theater at its best.

All of these Medicare polls are meaningless unless you make it clear that the programs WILL NOT CHANGE for those 55 and older. Ryan's plan does not "privatize" medicare for anyone currently receiving benefits or those within 10 years of receiving benefits. That is a VERY important distinction, and could greatly affect the poll numbers.
THAT SAID, conservatives have a massive task of educating Americans about the insolvency of these programs. They are being told everything is fine by the Dems. The first rule of management is that when you are going to make changes, you must convince your employees that there is a need for change. Translate that to politics. We have to hammer away about the trouble these programs are in.

Certainly we should zero out Head Start, Planned Parenthood, most foreign aid, the Energy, Education and Labor departments, our vestigial Cold War overseas "defense" commitments, Obamacare, and the 2009 stimulus. Even if we weren't facing catastrophic debt, there's no excuse for having the government pay for such nonsense.

But the problem today is we do face catastrophic debt, so that even if we could eliminate all of the above and much more discretionary spending, we can't escape economic collapse until Medicare is addressed. It's no longer a choice of whether or not to leave it alone, the only choice is how to restructure it.

Reducing the federal government to an army and a pension fund would still result in bankruptcy. Restoring fiscal sanity is impossible without major cost-cutting reforms to Medicaire and/or Social Security. The two programs already eat up nearly half of the federal budget, and they are growing rapidly. Eliminating non-defense discretionary spending entirely would still leave an annual deficit that would have been shockingly large prior to 2008.

I'm all for cutting and eliminating lots of other programs, and that would perhaps allow somewhat less drastic cuts to the big programs for the elderly. But we can't avoid the dire need for major reforms.

"Make the Democrats choose between, say, Head Start, a program that demonstrably doesn’t work, and Medicare."

The problem with that, of course, is that Head Start is a miniscule budget item compared to Medicare. You could entirely eliminate all discretionary spending and just maintain defense, Social Security, and Medicare at current levels, and we'd still be in a crisis. There are really only four choices - 1) something like the Ryan plan, that forces seniors to pay for their own care (which I think we're seeing is politically unfeasible), 2) heavy payment cuts to providers and price controls (i.e. stop passing the "doc fix" each year) which will degrade the overall quality of care under Medicare, but keep it affordable, 3) massive tax increases, or 4) some combination of 1, 2 and 3 - raise taxes somewhat, cut benefits somewhat, lower reimbursement rates somewhat. If we're serious about the deficit, the focus should be on #4, because the default is #3 (and if we just keep borrowing to pay for Medicare at current rates, that simply amounts to deferred taxation - ANY unfunded spending will need to be paid for eventually, it's a fiction to say that you have lowered taxes when there's a deficit, because taxes will have to be raised at some later point to pay for that spending).

NRO posters, please remember this next time you feel the desire to tell the world how much things have changed and how the populace understands we are going bankrupt and whatnot.

Problem is the last election and the one before that happened because the average idiot voter is just mad the economy is bad.

This is why the only feasible future is bankruptcy.

What form the bankruptcy will take is open to question, but what is not even debatable is that we will not stop borrowing and spending.

In other words, Americans oppose cutting off free stuff and want other people to pay for this free stuff. Well sure, that’s democracy, but there aren’t enough other people , the “stuff” is getting more expensive and the interest payments on the credit card are starting to drown us in debt.

Take this question:

“the national debt could be reduced significantly by raising taxes on all Americans by a small percentage and making small reductions in Medicare and Social Security benefits. Is this something you would support or oppose? Do you support/oppose this strongly or somewhat?”

I’m sure that most Americans would support his, but it’s a fantasy. What if the question were rephrased to reflect reality by deleting “small percentage” and replacing it with “by 2/3rds?” How many American taxpayers would support increasing their taxes by 2/3rds? It probably would not all come at once, we’d be like frogs boiling in the water, an increase this year, an increase in several more years, until our grandkid’s tax burden was crushing and the young are perpetually shackled, paying for the benefits of their elders, until this unsustainable demographic Ponzi scheme collapses . Again – there are not enough “people making over $250,000 with enough money to make up the $70 trillion plus Medicare shortfall, so that means if we do nothing on Medicare, the not only the “Rich” will see massive tax increases, but EVERY. SINGLE. TAXPAYER. WILL. HAVE. MASSIVE. TAX. INCREASES, and even them Entitlements will consume discretionary spending, constrain all other Government action and make Congress and out Representative government essentially irrelevant . This battle is about more than just fiscal implosion, it’s about the American experiment in liberty and representative government started by the Founding Fathers ending with the United States becoming little more than a bureaucracy charged with administering a social insurance and social health program for seniors.

As another commenter stated, we have A LOT of educating to do. Even if ABC polled actual voters, I suspect Ryan’s insurance plan would be unpopular, but the Medicare debate is occurring without people having all of the facts. No one ever wants to cut benefits to Seniors, and that’s a very easy opinion to hold in the abstract if you ignore the price tag of those benefits.