While nearly eight out of 10 Americans say they favor a "public option" insurance plan in national health care reform proposals now before Congress, fewer than four out of 10 can correctly define what a public option means, a new poll underwritten by AARP shows.

Those and other poll findings are bad news for President Barack Obama, who's facing the possible defeat of most or all of one of his administration's highest-priority goals -- health care reform -- and the increasing political ire of independent voters who helped elect him.

The new polling -- done by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates -- was presented Tuesday night at an AARP-sponsored event in Denver, along with political analysis of the issue by Washington columnist Charlie Cook.

The poll surveyed 1,000 Democrats, Republicans and independents nationwide earlier this month.

While the survey results suggest strong agreement among Americans that health care delivery and payment must change, there's much less agreement on whether the problem calls for coughing up higher taxes or insurance premiums.

The reason? It's the economy, Cook said.

Almost 65 percent oppose increasing taxes to pay for covering the more than 46 million Americans who are estimated to be without coverage of any kind, even though on other questions a majority said they believed all people should be covered. And 73 percent said they are unwilling to see private health insurance premiums rise to cover those costs.

The conflict highlights one of the essential reasons Obama and members of Congress who support reform are having a tough time selling it to the American public: the economy has everybody worried.

Cook, whose non-partisan Cook Political Report newsletter is closely watched by Washington insiders, said the polling data may be worse for the Democrats now than it was in 1993, when then-President Bill Clinton proposed a massive overhaul of health care and a year later, the Democrats were forced by voters to give up control of the U.S. Congress.

This time around, Cook said, with the president leaving it to Congress to hammer out specifics of the reform plan, "President Obama made the mistake of outsourcing major public policy to an institution that doesn't have a lot of credibility -- Congress."

Couple that with diminishing support for Obama from independent voters who were key to his election last year, and Cook said, "I don't know that there's an ending that the president is going to like."

He also predicted that Colorado would again be a political battleground state for the mid-term elections, with a newly appointed political newcomer, Sen. Michael Bennet, and vulnerable Democrats in several key districts facing election.

Click here to download the poll in PDF format.

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