Cool story of the healthcare debate
This is really neat. It clearly shows what people are worried about and what they are thinking.
From 538:
Gallup did something pretty cool in connection with their latest health care survey, which was to provide the verbatim responses (.xls) of the rationales given by people who would tell their Congressman to vote for or against the current health care bills, respectively.
I ran the responses through Wordle, a word-cloud generating tool, omitting certain words that were parts of speech or were otherwise nongermane.
Here are the words that were used most frequently by the 45 percent of the country who would tell their Congressman to vote for the health care bill:
And here are the words used most commonly by the 48 percent of the country who would tell their Congressman to vote against it:
In some sense, this is a very old-fashioned debate about the proper role of government. The message that the pro-reform voters have taken away comes through loudly and clearly: ‘PEOPLE … NEED … INSURANCE’, whereas concerns among the anti’s boil down to ‘GOVERNMENT’ and ‘COST’.
