Them thats got shall get
Them thats not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own.

So wrote and sang Billie Holiday in 1939. Seventy years later, you can take this classic blues tune as the anthem for the perceptual chasm between people who have and don’t have health insurance in the U.S.

Uninsured people tend not to like their health care very much. If you’re insured, you’re pretty happy about your health care coverage.

In a national survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted in May 2009, Rasmussen Reports explores this split.

There are other splits among Americans in the current health insurance debate. Most Democrats (54%) are willing to pay higher taxes to expand health coverage to the uninsured. This varies dramatically by party affiliation: 77% of Republicans do not favor paying for universal health out of tax receipts. 54% of Democrats are.

There’s also a mixed bag when it comes to whether a public government-sponsored plan should compete with private plans in the new scheme. 43% of Americans believe such a public plan would worsen quality of care in the U.S.

Overall, just 1 in 3 Americans says the health system is good or excellent. But if you’re covered, 70% rate coverage good or excellent.

Health Populi’s Hot Points: The bottom line: 63% of Americans agree with President Obama’s goal of seeing all Americans covered by a health plans. In past polls from the Harvard School of Public Health and Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans who had health coverage tended to focus on their happily-covered world; they didn’t express much empathy across the coverage aisle for people without health insurance.

This Rasmussen Poll shows a shift: while people with health insurance coverage tend to rate it pretty highly, there is still a groundswell among 2 in 3 Americans that the system isn’t working well.