News/Commentary

Sixty-three percent of those polled by Thomson Reuters, a global news organization, said:

• They believe people are “entitled to the best healthcare.”

• They say that they would pay more for that to be available.

• They say that they would pay more even though they report being satisfied with what they have today.

Has any other poll told us this? Perhaps the questions have not been asked the way this survey did. The sample size was generous, more than 3,000, and those called lived in all 50 states.

There is the one health care conversation going on in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals, which is focused on costs. It is not that elected officials don’t care about care quality. They are under the gun to pay for it and therefore that is where their attention is.

There are many other conversations going on among researchers who, depending upon their area of interest, are most concerned about quality indicators, cost-effectiveness and reimbursement issues, just for starters. Let us say that their conversation is about careful measurement of care, costs and fairness, to cover the broad sweep of their focus. A zillion sub-topics fit under that one sentence. There has been surprising agreement among physicians, either polled or as spoken for by associations, in support of the public option in the health care reform bill. That one, the one just defeated.

It is safe to say that the capitals and the professors are not on the same page about health reform, or at least, not as often as you might expect.

Americans in general appear to be having an entirely different conversation—-perhaps they always have had it, if only in their heads.

They are not on the same page as either the elected officials or the professors. As noted above, they want the “best.”

We are not all in the same conversation and, at the end of the day, the voters prevail.

It remains to be seen what “best” means to Americans. However, this poll is a powerful measure of how strongly Americans feel about this. It does not get any hotter than this.

Talking about doing something and paying for it are two different things. In this economy, though, having respondents say that they would pay more for the best health care, even though they were satisfied with care available to them, is quite a profound statement.

The elected officials talk about “adequate” care and “access to care” and “costs.”

The professors talk about many things but, in the main, they favor rational care. Not rationed care. Rational care. Care which, through research, is shown to be effective in any number of ways they define in their studies. Words such as rational and effective don’t light any citizens up, either.

Here is the word that appears to light people up: Best.

For the millions of uninsured, they could light up over “adequate” and “cost-effective.”  The interesting thing about this poll is that there were no exclusions.

It wasn’t “I want the best for me and only me.”

The response was, among those 63%, that people are entitled to the best care. That is a generous majority on a topic as complex as this one.

Reuters

“Most Americans would pay higher taxes to fund healthcare reforms that provide the best quality of care, but only a minority expects Washington to deliver it, according to a survey released on Wednesday.”

…”There’s skepticism that the government can deliver value,” said Gary Pickens, chief research officer for Thomson Reuters’ healthcare and science research business. Thomson Reuters is the parent company of global news agency Reuters. (Emphasis added)

“But underlying this is a fairly strong belief that people are entitled to the best healthcare,” Pickens added. “This is a value statement: that people are entitled not just to good but to the best healthcare. And people are willing to pay for it.” (Emphasis added)

Source: Reuters, September 30, 2009