NurseWeek

Medical issues injected in white house race

By Bradford G. Brokaw
Health24News
September 1, 2000


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Washington (H24N). New survey data released Wednesday suggest that the public wants the government to take an active role in reducing the number of Americans who lack health insurance and that the issue is likely to sway voters in the upcoming presidential election.

The numbers show that a candidate’s position on health-care issues ranks next to education issues at the top of voters’ minds when deciding whom to support.

Those results in combination with other recent polling data suggest that the November election could largely turn on how well Republican candidate George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore sell their respective plans for reforming Medicare, regulating managed care and expanding access to health insurance, according to researchers.

Seventy-eight percent of those surveyed agreed that that the federal government should expand coverage to more of the 44 million Americans without health insurance, even considering that any move to do so could be expensive. Eighteen percent said that the government should not expand coverage.

Nearly 64 percent agreed that employers should be required by law to provide health insurance to their employees. Meanwhile, 58 percent said that they favor the government’s providing health coverage to people who are unemployed but looking for work.

"The backbone [to expanding insurance coverage] in the public’s mind is still the employer mandate" that served as the centerpiece of President Clinton’s failed attempt to deliver universal health care coverage in 1994, said Steven Kull, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA), which conducted the survey.

The difference in 2000 is that the public is expecting incremental reforms rather than the sweeping changes proposed by Clinton, according to Kull.

"The public supports creating the employer mandate and then having the government fill in the gap" with coverage for the poor, he said.

The numbers were derived from a national sample of 652 adults taken between June 23 and July 9 of this year. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

The survey comes just as Gore is making a push to contrast his health-care proposals with those of Bush.

Gore is spending this week pitching his plan for adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare and his proposal to provide health insurance for all children by 2004.

Gore has proposed using direct government subsidies to help seniors buy prescription drugs, while Bush is endorsing a plan that would use government money to subsidize private drug coverage.

Recent polling data from Harvard University have shown support as high as 90 percent for universal child coverage, Kull said. Other polling data have suggested that as many as 57 percent of voters support Gore’s plan, while 36 percent support Bush’s plan, he added.

Support is also high for a congressionally mandated Patients Bill of Rights to regulate the managed care industry. A July 2000 poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard University and the Washington Post showed 81 percent support for a law that would allow people in managed care plans to see specialists and to sue their health plan.

Gore supports broader managed care reform, including the right to sue, while Bush has argued for more strict reforms, including third-party review of all plan coverage decisions.

Both candidates’ health-care proposals are resonating with voters, but Gore may be capitalizing on Democrats’ traditional advantage in debates over health care. "Gore is a little bit closer to the public on a lot of these issues," said COPA research associate Philip Warf.