By Evan Falchuk

The news is full of stories about the President’s declining poll numbers.

Analysts struggle to explain the politics of what is wrong.  But anyone in the business of employee benefits shouldn’t be surprised at all.

You don’t mess with people’s health care.

Benefits professionals could tell you all about situations where companies have tried to make important — or even minor — changes to their employees’ health plans, only to run into strong resistance.  It’s one of the reasons they work so hard to communicate and engage with employees on this subject.  Smart companies don’t change health benefits without spending a lot of time explaining things to their employees and incorporating their views.  It’s hard work, and it takes time.  But it’s necessary if you want to make effective change.

A survey by the National Business Group on Health in a couple of years ago is still one of the best on this problem.  Helen Darling, President of the NBGH said at the time: “Overall, no aspect of a job is more important to workers of large companies than having good benefits, and our survey results clearly show that the benefit most important for most workers is the health plan.”

Here’s what she is talking about.  The NBGH survey of American workers found that:

• 75% said they would forgo a pay raise if it meant they had to buy health insurance on their own

• 60% would not trade a drop in health benefits for a better retirement plan

• 83% said that if their company had to cut total compensation costs, they would rather have their pay or retirement plans cut than give up any of their benefits

And yet here is the President, proposing national insurance exchanges where it sounds like employees may be encouraged to buy their own coverage.  Saying that we need to control health care costs because the government won’t be able to afford retirement plans like Social Security and Medicare.  Telling us that the government needs to save money and so has to think of ways to cut spending on health care — and raise their taxes.

It’s the perfect combination of the worst buttons to push on health care.

Imagine a CEO who told his workers, good news, we need to save money for our retirees, so I’m going to cut your health benefits in ways that are very complicated and hard to explain.  Also, I’m going to cut your pay.  And, by the way, I don’t want to talk about this for very long, we need to do this right now.

He’d be awfully unpopular.  And that’s pretty much what we’re seeing now.

Of course there’s plenty of polling data that show that, in theory, most Americans support all kinds of changes to health care.  But when you are talking about their health care, well, it’s pretty simple.  Don’t mess with it.