At an event at the American Enterprise Institute held in September, Bill Gradison made an interesting observation about the fate of the Clinton plan in the early 1990s. At the time, Gradison was president of the Health Insurance Association of America (which has morphed into the trade association called America’s Health Insurance Plans.) Gradison’s group did a daily tracking poll. Gradison said about Clinton’s plan that after the president’s kick-off speech “support just started to slip, not dramatically, but just steadily . . . and the longer the plan was out there . . . the less support there was for it. I think that what happened is that the more the public knew about the plan, the less they liked it.”
It looks like we’re seeing the same thing again. In the polls collected by pollster.com, there is a downward trend in support in recent weeks. Support bottomed out in August, rose after President Obama’s speech in early September, and has been on a steady downward path in the last month.