By Rory Kulz
Harris Interactive conducted a poll about attitudes towards health care in each of 7 countries:
Now what can we take away from this data? Well, I think there are two things.
First of all, somewhere around 70-80% of respondents in each country are dissatisfied in some way with their health care system (I am referring to the individuals who did not say "only minor changes needed" as the dissatisfied group); we in the U.S. have the most dissatisfied (and the only country going over 80%) at 82%. The sole exception to this is the Dutch, who typically rate their system highly and of whom only 58% are dissatisfied in some way. Some believe the Dutch system might actually be a good model for U.S. reform, since it maintains private insurance and some coverage through employers while (a.) keeping payments low for consumers by emphasizing transparent costs and (b.) subsidizing care across the board and managing risk pools so that the elderly, the sick, etc. are able to receive the coverage they need while insurers are protected against risk. While all people in the Netherlands are required to be insured, much like Clinton advocated in the primaries, long-term treatments/hospitalizations and disability costs such as wheelchairs are fully covered by the state, and costs are mostly low for the individual Dutch consumer.
Second of all, when we look at the dissatisfied individuals in each country, most want some change but do not want to throw their system out completely. Less than a quarter among the dissatisfied respondents in most of the countries want to throw their system out, with the least going to The Netherlands (16% = 9/58) and Canada (17% = 12/72). The UK, New Zealand, and Austria come in next with 21% (15/72), 23% (17/73), and 25% (18/73) respectively. What do all of these countries have in common? Easy: strongly nationalized health care. Many are by now familiar with the universal systems in the UK and Canada. In New Zealand, the costs are few, just visits primarily to your family doctor or general practitioner, and costs even for this for the poor are picked up partially by the state. Accidents and necessary specialized care are picked up entirely by the government. Austria also has universal health care, including dental treatment.
This leaves Germany and the United States in a different category altogether. Of dissatisfied respondents, 35% (27/78) of Germans and a whopping 41% (34/82) of Americans state that they want to see radical, throw-that-baby-and-the-bathwater-way-out change. So what's the takeaway here? As Ezra Klein noted in his post on this poll, Germany is the least state-run health care next to the United States. It has a dual public-private system, and there is no cost-free care to patients without insurance, not even in state-run hospitals. I submit that perhaps the primary cause of dissatisfaction among Germans might be the growing fear that the wealthy are to receive a higher standard of health care due to their ability to buy into private plans and increasing growth in that sector.
Food for thought. At the very least though, I think, regardless of what one thinks about socialized health care, this shoots down any arguments about people in countries with socialized medicine being immensely more dissatisfied than us due to "wait times", "being unable to get an operation", etc. which are typically exaggerated and even more typically just a proxy for "life under socialism (gasp!)". In fact, the opposite is true: we are the ones who are sick of how we treat our sick.
Rory Kulz is a senior at Harvard College pursuing a degree in computer science and mathematics. When he's not solving the U.S. health care crisis, he clogs at Horrible Excursions into Medialand.
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