In my post Friday, the discussion turned to conservatives’ views on universal healthcare, specifically about the deserving/undeserving paradigm. I have written about this before a great length, including in a piece called We’re Not Ready for Universal Healthcare (because we disagree on basic morality). I wrote about the voluminous evidence that conservatives puritanical mindset makes them suspicious of others and unwilling to consider social welfare benefits, including healthcare, because they might go to people that they consider “undeserving.” I presumed that the great majority of conservatives felt this way.
However, I have been working with a group called USA Healthcare, a group dedicated to getting past the usual left-right construction of arguments about universal healthcare. We decided that rather than presupposing what conservatives think, we would actually ask them. So, we did a survey of about 250 self-identified Republicans and asked them about our principles, namely universality, simplicity, and affordability. The results surprised me and I posted about them here in an article entitled, Maybe We Are Ready for Universal Healthcare?
The most salient points to our discussion are these:
- Is healthcare a right? 32% of our cohort thought so! 42% agreed it was a necessity and 17% think of it as a public service good. Less than 10% thought of it as a consumer good!
- Only 3% thought healthcare is deserved by only those who can afford it.
- However, when asked straight up if healthcare should be universal 28% disagreed.
I’ve documented my thoughts about this and the rest of the survey results, so I won’t repeat them here. But the reason I’m writing this is because I recently had a conversation with a friend from Utah who is part of a universal healthcare advocacy group in that state. He said one of the stumbling blocks they encountered was resistance to the word universal and the idea of universality. He attributed it to the same puritanical mindset of believing that there were truly people undeserving of our help and support.
It reminded me of something we had explored in our USA healthcare group previously, “Who exactly would you leave out of universal healthcare?” And, taken further for evangelicals and Mormons, “Who would Jesus leave out?”
I reminded my friend of our survey results showing that relatively few of our respondents seem to hold this “undeserving” position. He pointed out that in his experience, every Republican politician held this view. And I think he’s right.
But I think this is where our opportunity lies. As we discovered in our polling, with regards to all the elements of our USA triad, the ordinary Republicans who responded were not all that different in their assessments of the problems and solutions to the American healthcare mass as we had presupposed. I’ll let you review all of this for yourselves, but this could be a wedge issue, not Democrats v. GOP, but rather ordinary GOP identifying voters and their leadership. Ordinary citizens do not get the benefits of being in the pocket of the Medical Industrial Complex. No campaign or PAC donations, no lobbyists flattering them, etc.
Uwe Reinhardt called this Political Sustainability. I did a YouTube video about this, but basically it is the idea that even though healthcare is financially unsustainable for people who get sick and have to pay for premiums out of their wages, and even though it is economically unsustainable for us as a nation to keep paying these prices and having these bad outcomes, it remains sustainable politically. The money and influence of the Medical Industrial Complex makes it so!
Since I now realize I haven’t yet made the Political Sustainability video into a blog post yet, I will do that this week for further discussion!
That’s all for now!
