SPECIAL REPORT
The latest on health-care reform
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — As members of Congress return to their states and districts to debate the merits of the Democrats’ proposals for health care reform, critics of the proposals may repeat the phrase used by some Republicans, newspaper editorials and bloggers that “the American health care system is the envy of the world.”
If so, they should read the results of a recent Harris/Decima poll in Canada that found a 10-to-1 majority of Canadians believed their system was “superior” to the U.S. system.
They might also note that a 70 percent majority of Canadians thought their system was “performing well”; and that a majority favored an expansion of public sector health care (i.e., “government-run” health care in the current debate) over private sector health care.
These are some of the results of a recent Harris/Decima telephone survey conducted between June 4 and 8 by Harris/Decima among 1,000 Canadian adults.
The main findings were:
12 percent of Canadians thought their system was performing “very well” and 58 percent thought it was performing “fairly well” while 9 percent thought it was performing “not well at all” and 19 percent though it was performing “not that well.”
55 percent favored an expansion of the public sector. Just over a quarter, 27 percent, thought that the Canadian system had got the balance between public and private sector health care right. Twelve percent favored a tilt toward the private sector.
82 percent of Canadians believed their country’s health care system was superior to the U.S. system and 8 percent thought the U.S. system was superior.
Results in other countries
In June 2008, a Financial Times/Harris Poll found that 59 percent of British adults and 70 percent of French adults believed their countries’ health care systems were “the envy of the world.”
This can be compared with a Harris Poll in the United States, conducted with the Harvard School of Public Health in March 2008, that found that only 45 percent of Americans believed that they had “the best health care system in the world.”
Another Harris Poll report, published July 2, 2008, compared the popularity of the health care systems in 10 countries.
The United States system was the most unpopular. It reported that 33 percent of Americans felt there was “so much wrong with the health care system, we need to completely rebuild it.” In the other nine countries between 9 percent (in the Netherlands) and 20 percent (in Italy) felt this way. Only 12 percent of Americans thought that “the system works pretty well.”
