Polling firm Gallup reported Nov. 18 that its most-recent annual health-care poll, conducted Nov. 7-10, found that 56 percent of U.S. adults now say it’s not the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health-care coverage.

Before 2009, “a clear majority of Americans consistently had said the government should take responsibility for ensuring that all Americans have health care,” Gallup said in its survey report. That view peaked in 2006, when 69 percent of Americans said it’s the federal government’s duty to make sure all Americans have health-care coverage, while only 28 percent said it wasn’t.

“Attitudes began to shift significantly in 2007, and continued to change through the time President Barack Obama took office in 2009,” the Gallup report prepared by Joy Wilke said. “Americans who feel healthcare coverage is not the federal government’s responsibility have been in the clear majority the past two years.”

Attitudes across all three partisan groups have shifted away from the view that ensuring health-care coverage is government’s role, but most especially among Republicans and independents, according to Gallup.

Since 2000, the share of Republicans believing the government should not be responsible for ensuring all Americans have health coverage has risen from 53 percent to 86 percent, according to Gallup.

The polling firm found that 55 percent of independents currently say the government should not be involved with health care, up from 27 percent in 2000.

The percentage of Democrats holding this view now stands at 30 percent, up from 10 percent in 2006 and 19 percent in 2000, Gallup found.

“The continuing implementation of the [national health-care law] over the coming months and years will surely continue to shape Americans’ attitudes toward the federal government’s role in this area,” Wilke wrote. “It is not clear how the [law’s] troubled rollout to date will affect attitudes over the next year. But as the debate about the implementation of the new healthcare law has unfolded, Americans have become less likely than ever to agree that the federal government should be responsible for making sure that all Americans have healthcare.”

Gallup said it conducted telephone interviews of a random sample of 1,039 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points.

WEST MONROE — After 35 years of working for someone else’s company, David (Dave) Ciereck is now operating his own business.

Ciereck launched Dave’s Hard Surface Restoration, the “doing business as” name of Ciereck Enterprises, LLC, in July. He operates the business from his home in the town of West Monroe.

He started the business after working seven years as an operations manager for Equipment & Controls Africa in its office in Cabinda, Angola. The U.S. headquarters of Equipment & Controls Africa is in Carnegie, Pa., according to its website.

With his visa expiring, Ciereck left Equipment & Controls Africa in July to return home to Central New York to focus on starting his own business with an eye toward eventual retirement.

“I didn’t want a regular job. I wanted a business,” Ciereck says.

While searching online, he “stumbled across” The Master’s Touch, Inc. of Glendale, Ariz. from which he purchased his floor-restoration business.

In conducting his research, he couldn’t find “a lot of people” offering that type of service in Central New York.

In describing its business system on its website, The Master’s Touch says, “Start with a proven hard surface cleaning & restoration system that provides you the ability
to earn a six figure income!”

Both Ciereck and the website of The Master’s Touch indicate it is not a franchise.

A franchise requires royalty payments, he says, but that’s not part of Ciereck’s agreement with Masters’ Touch. Franchises require their franchisees to operate under their rules, Ciereck adds, while he’s “free to expand and do whatever else I feel is necessary to do.”

It also didn’t require an agreement restricting his service to any specific geographic location, he adds.

“I purchased the equipment and got the training from them, and I get lifetime support from them,” he says.

When asked how much he had to pay to acquire the equipment from The Master’s Touch, Ciereck declined to disclose the figure, saying only, “It wasn’t cheap.”

He used his own assets for a “good chunk” of the down payment. Salt Lake City, Utah–based Aztec Financial, LLC, which provides financing for entrepreneurs working with The Master’s Touch, lent Ciereck additional capital to make the down payment, he says.

Ciereck’s investment included trailer-mount equipment for high-pressure, hot-water extraction for the cleaning of carpets, tile, and grout floors.

“Main-line work is tile and grout cleaning, restoring tile and grout to its original color and cleanliness,” he says.

 As Ciereck describes it, grout is the series of lines between tiles on a hard-surface floor.

“Tile itself is very hard. It’s non porous, so dirt cannot penetrate it. The grout is very porous and dirt gets in it and stays there,” he says.

Ciereck also handles carpet cleaning, concrete cleaning, and grease removal.

 He’s also getting calls from customers asking if he has the capability of placing an epoxy coating on concrete for painting those surfaces, he says.

“We can do this,” he adds.

So far, he’s serviced about a dozen commercial customers and about 30 residential customers, he says.

Ciereck is currently hoping to hire two full-time employees before year’s-end and another two full-time workers by the end of 2014. 

Besides generating additional revenue, Ciereck wants some employees so he can start focusing on the marketing of his company.

To get the business started, The Master’s Touch designed the Ciereck’s website, and he maintains its content with updates.

“It was part of the package,” he says.

The Master’s Touch also provided him with marketing brochures and he speaks with company officials every few weeks, he says.

Ciereck declined to disclose any revenue figures for 2013 or projections for 2014.

He worked for 35 years in the industrial maintenance and restoration field. In addition to his most recent work as operations manager for Equipment & Controls Africa, he also spent time as a plumbing foreman for Burns Bros Contractors of Syracuse.

As Ciereck looks to grow his restoration business in 2014, he has a simple philosophy.

“We never make promises we can’t keep,” he says. “You can never get caught in the truth.”

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com