SENIOR JOURNAL.COM - Senior Citizens Information and News

Front Page    Search     Contact Us     Advertise in Senior Journal

E-mail this page to a friend!

Gov Programs for Seniors Strongly Supported but Not Highly Regarded

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid among worst rated government services

Dec. 24, 2005 – The three major government programs for senior citizens – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - get very strong support from American adults but also very high negative ratings on their performance.

When asked in a recent Harris Poll how strongly they support 14 different government services, five services receive strong, or a fair amount of support, from about three-fourths of all adults or more.

The five most popular services are The National Parks Service (85% support), Crime-fighting and prevention services (77%) Medicare (76%), Social Security (76%), and Unemployment benefits (74%).

Other services which are supported by 65 percent or more of all adults are Defense (71%), Medicaid (71%), Federal aid to public schools (69%) and Federal government emergency services (65%).

Three other services are supported by majorities of under 65 percent, Homeland Security (62%), Intelligence Services (61%), and food stamps (59%).

Only two services on the list do not receive majority support, Immigration and Naturalization services (47%) and Foreign aid (40%).

These are the results of a nationwide survey of 1,718 adults surveyed online between November 15 and 22, 2005 by Harris Interactiveฎ.

Differences in Levels of Support among Republicans, Democrats and Independents

For some of these services there is little difference in the levels of support among Republicans, Democrats and Independents. This is true of the National Park Service, Medicare, Social Security, Crime-fighting and Prevention, Immigration and Naturalization, and Foreign aid.

Interestingly, Republicans are considerably more supportive of Medicare than are Democrats and Independents. Democrats, however, are much more supportive of Social Security and Medicaid than are Republicans or Independents.

There are however several services which receive more support from Democrats than Republicans, such as unemployment benefits (81% vs. 69%), federal aid to public schools (78% vs. 67%), and food stamps (71% vs. 45%).

There are also two services which receive substantially more support from Republicans than from Democrats, defense (93% vs. 61%) and homeland security (82% vs. 60%).

Measuring Their Performance

Support for a service does not necessarily mean that it gets high ratings for its performance. In an earlier survey conducted online among 1,833 adults by Harris Interactive between October 11 and 17, 2005, far fewer people gave most services high ratings. For example:

  ● Medicaid which enjoys the support of 71 percent of all adults is rated 73 percent negative, 27 percent positive.

  ●Social Security, which enjoys very strong support (76%) is rated 73 percent negative, 27 percent positive.

  ●Medicare, also a very popular service (76% support) is rated 73 percent negative, 27 percent positive.

  ●Federal aid to public schools which is supported by 69 percent of adults is rated 74 percent negative, 26 percent positive.

All of the nine services rated in October (the list did not include five of the services included in the November survey), received more negative than positive ratings. Those which had the most positive ratings by the public are: defense (45% positive), foreign aid (44%), and food stamps (33%).

Some of these ratings are somewhat surprising. For example, the relatively high ratings for foreign aid, the service which has the lowest level of support; and emergency services which is rated more favorably than four other popular services in spite of the widely reported failures of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Note: Net percentages may not add up exactly due to rounding.

October 2005 results

Note: Five of the services included in Table 1 were not included in this question asked in October, so there are no Oct. ratings for the National Parks Service, Crime-fighting and Prevention, Homeland Security, Intelligence Services or Immigration and Naturalization services.

Methodology

One Harris Pollฎ was conducted online within the United States between November 15 and 22, 2005 among 1,718 U.S. adults (aged 18 and over). The other Harris Pollฎ was conducted online between October 11 and 17, 2005 with a nationwide sample of 1,833 adults. Figures for age, sex, race, education, region and household income were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.

In theory, with probability samples of this size, one could say with 95 percent certainty that the overall results have a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points of what they would be if the entire U.S. adult population had been polled with complete accuracy. Sampling error for sub-samples is higher and varies. Unfortunately, there are several other possible sources of error in all polls or surveys that are probably more serious than theoretical calculations of sampling error. They include refusals to be interviewed (nonresponse), question wording and question order, and weighting. It is impossible to quantify the errors that may result from these factors. This online sample was not a probability sample.

Click here to Search SeniorJournal.com for more on this subject

Click to More Senior News on the Front Page

Copyright: SeniorJournal.com