WASHINGTON — The front page of the Washington Post this week featured a headline declaring that a “clear majority” now favors the so-called “public option” involved with health-care reform.

Opponents of the public option quickly attacked the survey’s findings, faulting pollsters for not spelling out in their question what a public option would entail.

The question read: “Would you support or oppose having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?” Critics observed that the question didn’t make it clear that a new public option health insurance plan would be “government run.”

Debates like these spurred discussion Friday on Capitol Hill among four of Washington’s top polling experts, who spoke during a luncheon sponsored by the Alliance for Health Reform, a Washington-based nonprofit group.

The group was generally in agreement on several points regarding health-care polling:

– That there is much uncertainty among Americans regarding particular aspects of health-care reform, such as the public option. But they generally support health-care reform of some kind, as long as they don’t have to pay for it out of their pocket.

– A pollster’s wording of questions and arguments given to Americans on issues during survey interviews can significantly shape poll results.

– Finally, some Americans being polled don’t even understand the issues that surveyors are asking about.

Karlyn Bowman, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, said the deluge of surveys about health-care reform and the varying survey techniques make it difficult to capture Americans’ sentiments.

“I would argue that there is no public opinion on the public option. You can move the public opinion needle significantly with changing the wording or emphasis,” Bowman said.

“We know from polling in this area and many other areas that people like having choices, especially in the abstract. If you asked people about the decision to smoke, have an abortion, and even to kill yourself, Americans want choices and they want the choices to be theirs. When questions emphasize giving people choice or options, people like the idea.”

Mark Blumenthal, a former Democratic pollster who is now the editor and publisher of pollster.com, said some Americans’ lack of knowledge about health-care reform can skew survey data.

He pointed to a Pew Research Center poll taken in early October, which found that only 56 percent of about 1,000 adults surveyed knew the term “public option” deals with health care.

“Americans aren’t sitting at home watching this debate like they’re members of a jury. They’re not processing every article, weighing every fact, and taking it into account,” Blumenthal said. “They are getting a little bit of the coverage, which is mostly focused on process and who’s arguing with whom, and they’re getting a very broad sense.”

Added Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll, a media survey organization: “Health-care reform is fiendishly complicated. The number of balls in the air is absolutely amazing. The number of little policies which nobody outside a few thousand policy wonks and people on Capitol Hill could understand is enormous.”