Is The Health Care Debate About Reform or Obama?

Health care reform, President Obama’s key domestic challenge, cleared a major hurdle Tuesday as the Senate Finance Committee passed its overhaul bill with support from one Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine.

But a look through Patchwork Nation shows that support for reform is still below 50 percent in 10 of 12 of the project’s community types. And support may be just as much about the details of the plan as it is about Obama.

Only in the Industrial Metropolis and the wealthier Monied ‘Burbs community types did support reach more than 50 percent.

“It’s interesting because those two places were also were big Obama supporters in the November elections and it makes you wonder how much of this public debate about health care reform is about health care reform and how much of it is about Barack Obama and the struggles the country’s going through right now,” said Patchwork Nation project director Dante Chinni.

Listen to Chinni’s full interview

By contrast, support for health reform is falling in the once-fast and diversifying Boom Towns and the heavily Hispanic Immigration Nation communities.

“A lot of that may have to do with people thinking that illegal immigrants would be covered and being opposed to that,” Chinni said.

The numbers were collected by the Pew Center for the People and the Press from the question: “Do you generally favor or oppose the health care proposals being discussed in Congress?” Chinni’s blog on the Christian Science Monitor’s Patchwork Nation site includes a graph of where all the communities stand in their support for health reform.