People consider Medicare an important part of their lives, one expert said. Poll: 58% oppose Medicare cuts

Americans want Washington to keep its hands off their Medicare.

That’s the gist of a poll released Thursday showing that the public isn’t ready for the dramatic changes in Medicare that are under discussion to help control the nation’s finances.


Fifty-eight percent of people oppose any spending cuts to Medicare and 46 percent oppose any cuts in Medicaid, according to the poll, released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. Medicare received the strongest support, after protecting public education.

Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health, says the public supports Medicare even more than the numbers let on. People feel very strongly about Medicare and consider it an important part of their lives, he says, calling it one of the biggest disconnects between the public and “official” Washington that he’s ever seen.

“The people we’re surveying think you should close maybe eight to 10 of the major Cabinet offices before you get to cutting this program,” Blendon said Thursday. In Washington, “Every meeting I go to is ‘let’s get it on the table, let’s start working.’”

Raising the Medicare age and adding new means testing to the program are two ideas frequently brought up in the deficit-reduction talks. But he cautioned that once the public realizes that their programs are under real discussion, they’ll make their opinions known.

“There’s going to be a huge political backlash” he said. “This is not the audience for the French Revolution on Medicare.”

The Kaiser poll also tested public opinion on implementation of the health law.

Fifty-five percent of Americans want a health insurance exchange — a key part of the health law — to be a “top priority” for their local governments this year, according to the poll. Nearly as many — 52 percent — want their state to expand the Medicaid program, a choice granted to the states by the Supreme Court in its June ruling on the health care law.

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The figures show that the nation is still somewhat divided on those pieces of the law but demonstrate dramatically more agreement than the public holds on the health law on the whole.