The People Voted for Change and Now it’s Here

As a democratic society, the people choose and have a say in the way the system is being run. To get a general idea of what the people like or don’t like is often conducted through surveys or polls. Pollster.com has posted a poll with responses from different news outlets entitled, Health Care Plan: Favor / Oppose.

The poll results were organized in a scatter plot with correlation lines. The opposing trend was coded red and the favoring trend was coded black. This particular poll was conducted during the formation through to the debate of the health care plan in January of 2009 until March of 2010. The plot effectively showed particular news outlets and the amount of respondent in each field:

• Favor
• Oppose
• Undecided
• No opinion

With dots scattered throughout the plot, many of which over lapped or were close together made reading each news outlet’s response tedious. Also, the plot was limited to only those selected news outlets and not every possible outlet. The average correlation lines presented were hard to follow with the trend of the dots because the dots seemed to be scattered all around each other. Misleading as well was the number of individuals in a certain company who participated in the poll. Each population differed.

There was a chart though that helped organize the data which aided in understanding the points on the graph. The results of the data showed that an average 50.4% opposed while 42.1% favored the health care plan. This result shown with the scatter plot proved a nearly balanced correlation between the two variables meaning that people were not completely against the plan yet they weren’t completely for it either.

For those who favored the plan, approximately 30 million people who lack coverage will be provided coverage according to a health care reform article in The New York Times. News outlets are expected to be more knowledgeable about the health care debate considering that they cover it in varying degrees so this graph effectively gave its viewers a sense of where their news sources stand. It provided some reassurance that the plan was good. It also pointed to the fact that there were flaws with the plan but no specifics were pointed out for either one. Thus, the scattered plot proves to be the best way to see the association between variables that are large as for the health care debate.