Universal Healthcare: Is America Ready?

Winter, 2008, Volume 30, Number 1

Panelists (from left) Babs Waldman, Benjamin Page, Burton Weisbrod, Leemore Dafny, and Larry Suffredin tackle healthcare issues.

A November panel on “Health Care Disparities and Solutions” addressed some of the issues and views for a universal U.S. plan. It was organized by the Undergraduate Lecture Series on Race, Poverty, and Inequality, and IPR was a co-sponsor.

Benjamin Page, an IPR faculty associate, addressed the question of whether Americans want universal healthcare. His recent research shows that a majority of Americans—Republicans and Democrats—favor a “single government plan” for healthcare. Though Americans might worry about “big government” in the abstract, they actually favor programs and even taxes for them, said Page, the Fulcher Professor of Decision Making.

IPR Faculty Associate Leemore Dafny said a universal plan would require federal action and a big increase in public spending. “The data doesn’t support the idea of a free lunch,” said Dafny, assistant professor of management and strategy. “When people have health insurance, they spend more.”

IPR Faculty Fellow Burton Weisbrod emphasized how the high cost of medical care results fundamentally from very expensive new medical technologies developed over the past 50 years—MRIs and organ transplants, for example. The artificial heart, soon available, will cost $300,000 per person—or hundreds of billions if only a fraction of 1 percent of Americans over 65 needed one.

Babs Waldman, a medical director with the free health clinic Community Health, gave a street-level view of “disparities within disparities” where those without insurance, mainly the working poor and minorities, are three times more likely to die.

Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin described how the county’s system had changed from delivering primary care in clinics to providing charity and emergency care in hospitals, driving costs up. Charity care, he noted, is everyone’s problem: When emergency rooms are full, ambulances sometimes bypass several hospitals before finding one open.