people, the insurance companies will demand higher rates from it
than the one the executive belongs to, which will include mostly
wealthier, lower-risk people.
According to a Harris poll, Americans prefer the Canadian-style
healthcare system by a huge majority. That’s kind of remarkable,
given the minimal amount of media attention the single-payer system
has received.
The best work I know on this is by Vicente Navarro. He’s
discovered that there’s been quite consistent support for something
like a Canadian-style system ever since polls began on this issue,
which is now over forty years.
Back in the 1940s, Truman tried to put through such a program.
It would have brought the US into line with the rest of the industrial
world, but it was beaten back by a huge corporate offensive,
complete with tantrums about how we were going to turn into a
Bolshevik society and so on.
Every time the issue has come up, there’s been a major
corporate offensive. One of Ronald Reagan’s great achievements
back in the late 1960s was to give somber speeches (written for
him by the AMA) about how if the legislation establishing Medicare
was passed, we’d all be telling our children and grandchildren
decades hence what freedom used to be like.
Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein [both of Harvard
Medical School] also cite another poll result: When Canadians were
asked if they’d want a US-style system, only 5% said yes.
By now, even large parts of the business community don’t want
it. It’s just too inefficient, too bureaucratic and too costly for them.
The auto companies estimated a couple of years ago that it was
costing them about $500 extra per car just because of the
inefficiencies of the US healthcare system—as compared with, say,
their Canadian operations.
When business starts to get hurt, then the issue moves into the
public agenda. The public has been in favor of a big change for a long
time, but what the public thinks doesn’t matter much.
There was a nice phrase about this sort of thing in the