An op-ed published last week in the New York Times laments Americans' decline in support for government involvement in the redistribution of wealth - or, as the Times author Thomas Edsall calls it, ‘sharing’. Edsall analyses a bunch of polls throughout the article, but what he finds troubling I find to be good common sense. For example, most Americans aren't incredibly trusting of their government:
Even worse for Democrats, the Saez paper found that “information about inequality also makes respondents trust government less,” decreasing “by nearly twenty percent the share of respondents who ‘trust government’ most of the time:”
Furthermore, most Americans aren’t convinced that Obamacare is going to be the shining, efficient, cheaper, all-inclusive beacon of hope it was promised to be:
An earlier New York Times poll, conducted in December 2013, found that 52 percent of those surveyed believed that the Affordable Care Act would increase their medical costs; 14 percent said it would reduce costs. Thirty-six percent believed that Obamacare would worsen the quality of health care compared to 17 percent who thought it would improve it.
On the whole Edsall appears to understand people’s perceptions of government care (to my relief and his dismay) quite well – except for in one area.
Esdall claims the “most dramatic” change in public opinion has been people’s perception of the ‘right’ to healthcare. He cites the two Gallup polls in an attempt to claim that majority support for guaranteed access to health coverage has dropped radically over the past six years:
The erosion of the belief in health care as a government-protected right is perhaps the most dramatic reflection of these trends. In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed by Gallup said that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States. By late 2014, however, Gallup found that this percentage had fallen 24 points to 45 percent, while the percentage of respondents who said health care is not a federal responsibility nearly doubled to 52 percent.
But Esdall isn’t comparing apples with apples. The belief that in a developed society everyone should have access to basic healthcare provisions is not the same as believing that healthcare is a federal responsibility – especially in the United States.
The debate is not – and has not been for a long time – whether or not people should have access to healthcare, but rather how that care should be provided. What kind of delivery of healthcare will create the cheapest prices and best outcomes, and what safety net for those at the bottom will provide the most comprehensive care?
There is huge demand in the States for healthcare reform, and most people want this reform to focus on cheaper access to care. But that can be achieved without fully handing healthcare provision over to the federal government or adopting something that resembles the NHS.
Both the US and the UK should be looking to countries that rank highest for healthcare provisions internationally, which have almost all settled on systems where the central government funds healthcare but does not directly provide healthcare. The Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany all have healthy relationships with private companies, ranging from insurance companies and charities, that provide better outcomes than those in the UK and in a cheaper, more efficient manner than in the US.
Support for universal access to healthcare and support for market mechanisms in healthcare are not mutually exclusive; there's plenty of evidence to suggest a combination of the two creates the best healthcare systems in the world.