I was reading about a poll the CBC commissioned recently about Health Care in Alberta. In reading about it, there was an article on the CBC Calgary homepage that suggests that a narrow 58% of people supported the return of premiums, with the Alberta Health Care system facing a billion-dollar shortfall. While the shortfall is undeniable, the usefulness of reinstating premiums on the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan (AHCIP) is questionable at best.
The question posed was “Would you support the re-introduction of health care premiums in order to help cover the health care funding shortfall? Is this strongly or somewhat?”
If asked the way it’s written, there’s two problems with the question. First, it’s loaded to boot. Yes there is a shortfall in health care funding, however with the costs of collecting the premiums, it could well be that it’s little more than a self-sustaining tax, which would pose no benefit in the face of the shortfall. Second, if posed as it is, it assumes one supports the re-introduction to begin with, so some people may have been led to a particular response, but we can’t know that for sure.
What I do know is, it’s not the first time I’ve heard of the CBC posing loaded questions in polls or just in general. For example, an associate producer that works on the CBC Radio Twitter handle (cbcradio) asked a while back if users would support either ads on the radio or cuts. CBC Radio is ad-free and the people that listen generally want it to stay that way, so being backed into a corner, a number of people did end up replying that they would rather see cuts before ads.
So, to the CBC, what the hell? Why the loaded questions? Yes your polls are conducted within the Journalistic Standards and Practices framework you have in place, but the way the question is posed is like asking if somebody would like a kick in the groin over having their bike stolen, or something similar.
I would love if somebody from the Mother Corp. would be willing to get in touch to discuss the poll, heck I’ll make it fun, they may even get to do a guest post about it. Let me know, CBC, I’d love to hear from you.
