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The latest edition of an annual health care poll conducted by Mass Insight suggests most people don’t find the price they pay for health coverage to be a serious problem. The poll, which will be officially released next week, also shows a large majority of people don’t want to give up anything when it comes to health coverage or the freedom to choose whom they see for medical help.

If insurers do not deliver health care to consumers at a price they can afford, many Democrats will renew their push for a government-run health plan, or public option, to compete with private insurers.

"What I worry about is that they aren't going to have the choices that we had," she said. "There are going to be mandates for everything. Mandates and taxes, more and more, a heavier burden on them. I'm feeling we're headed toward a socialist society, and I feel that it's not going to be reversible if it keeps going the way that it is."

“We’re confident that the benefits are going to accrue and strengthen business’s bottom line,” said Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House Health Reform Office.

To the extent that the legislative triumphs of the New Deal and Great Society are held up as inspirational examples in assessing what the Obama administration has achieved, one should also remember the structural advantages that Roosevelt and Johnson had in putting their programs through, and the help that they received, willing and unwilling, from political and social movement leaders who were beyond their control.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Within a year-- Provides a $250 rebate to Medicare prescription drug plan beneficiaries whose initial benefits run out.90 days after enactment-- Provides immediate access to high-risk pools for people who have no insurance because of preexisting conditions.Six months after enactment-- Bars insurers from denying people coverage when they get sick.

In fact, two recent polls, including one with the most negative ratings on health care, reveal through follow-up questions that a significant number of people who oppose current plans do so because they don't go far enough rather than because they go too far. Not only is it absurd to suggest that these people would rise up against Democrats for passing the president's plan, it is far more likely that they would join others who support the plan and punish those who tried to block reform or voted against it.

After Republican Scott Brown's election to the Senate in Massachusetts on Jan. 19, a coalition of liberal groups released a survey of Bay State voters who backed Obama in 2008 and who voted for Brown or did not vote in the special election. The findings, according to MoveOn.org, one of the groups, showed that respondents "worry that Democrats in power have not done enough to combat the policies of the Bush era" and want "stronger, more progressive action on health care reform."

While many are describing the election to fill the late Edward M. Kennedy's Senate seat as a referendum on national health-care reform, the Republican candidate rode to victory on a message more nuanced than flat-out resistance to universal health coverage: Massachusetts residents, he said, already had insurance and should not have to pay for it elsewhere.