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Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is running away from her previous support for Medicare for All.
That’s understandable: New public opinion research indicates it’s not what voters want.
Just 37% of likely voters support a government takeover of the country’s health insurance system and a concomitant ban on private health insurance, according to a survey conducted by Echelon Insights and sponsored by the Pacific Research Institute.
And support for such a single-payer system has been eroding, dropping three percentage points from 2023.
By contrast, 91% of insured voters are satisfied with their current plan.
That figure has grown three years in a row.
Those nine in 10 people with insurance ought to pay careful attention not just to what Harris & co. are saying about health care now, but what they’ve said in the past.
They won’t like what they hear.
In 2019, during her ill-fated first run for the presidency, Kamala Harris released her own single-payer health care plan.
As a US senator, she co-sponsored Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ quixotic bids for Medicare for All in 2017 and 2019.
“It’s just the right thing to do,” Harris said in 2017.
Two years later, when asked if she supported a ban on private insurance, Harris replied, “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”
Harris’ supporters claim she’s changed her mind, and a pliant press corps has taken them at their word.
But as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) recently asked, “How do you know that is not her position now?”
“She has not said that,” Cotton told host Jonathan Karl of ABC’s “This Week.” “She’s taking these efforts not to change these positions, but to hide these positions.”
Polling data suggest that’s smart politics.
Majorities across the political spectrum — three-quarters of Republicans, nearly six in 10 Democrats, and two-thirds of voters overall — believe that health care should empower doctors and patients to make the system more competitive, not give added power to the federal government, according to Echelon’s research.
Perhaps those numbers shouldn’t be surprising, given what government-run health care has delivered in other parts of the world.
Across our northern border, Canadians face a median wait time of more than 27 weeks — over six months — for treatment from a specialist following referral by a general practitioner, according to the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank.
That’s almost triple the median wait in 1993, when Fraser started tracking wait times.
In 2022, the Angus Reid Institute found that nearly 13 million Canadian adults, or 41%, reported either a challenge or an outright inability to access emergency care, non-emergency care, diagnostic examination, surgery or a specialist appointment.
The average family of four in Canada pays nearly $18,000 a year in taxes for government-sponsored health coverage, Fraser estimated this month — but all those taxes appear to buy little more than long waits and substandard care.
In short, Canada’s system of “universal” health care does not function universally.
Meanwhile, a health care crisis unfolded in Great Britain this year as chronic staffing shortages were exacerbated by strikes.
More than 7.6 million people were waiting for hospital treatment from the government-run National Health Service as of May.
In 1983, the British Social Attitudes survey first measured residents’ feelings about British life, including their medical experience.
Last year, a record low 24% of those polled claimed satisfaction with the NHS.
Wait times, staffing shortages and inadequate government spending were cited as the main concerns.
This is what a broken health care system looks like.
Kamala Harris and many of her fellow Democrats have a long track record of supporting a government takeover of the US health insurance system.
The many, many Americans who are satisfied with their own health care arrangements — and who don’t want to see Canadian or European health care imported stateside — should remember that record when they head to the polls this fall.
Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO and Thomas W. Smith fellow in health care policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is “False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All” (Encounter 2020).