Since it has now been found that most Americans are happy with the coverage they receive, there's no reason to nationalize health care. This is even true of most of those who don't have health insurance.
According to an article in Regulation magazine this week, 89% of Americans are satisfied with their personal medical care. During the prior year, regarding those with insurance who had suffered a serious illness, 93 percent say they were satisfied with their healthcare, while 95 percent of those who suffered chronic illness report being satisfied with their health care.
Pretty impressive numbers. Still as regards the American medical system in general, only 44 percent indicate being satisfied with its overall quality. This is because most Americans are under the impression that lack of insurance for others means that those people are receiving no access to health care. It was also reported that 88 percent of those surveyed believe that the problem of the uninsured is either "critical" or "serious but not critical."
Jack Calfee, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute says that it is extremely important if the insured come to believe that the uninsured are not that dissatisfied with their health care. He says that this could throw a real wild card into the whole health care debate.
In the Regulation magazine article a survey released in October 2006 by the Kaiser Family Foundation is closely examined. This survey’s uniqueness is that the publicly released data allow for an analysis regarding how happy the uninsured are with their health care. Understandably 93 % of the insured say that they are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their own health care, still another fully 70 percent of the uninsured also indicated their level of satisfaction as being the same.
Taking into consideration the Kaiser/ABC News and USA Today survey's estimate of the number of uninsured being 13.4 %of Americans and that 17.5 % of the uninsured are "very dissatisfied" with the level of healthcare that they are receiving, than this means that only 2.3% percent of Americans are both uninsured and "very dissatisfied" with the healthcare that they are receiving. This translates to approximately 5 million people. If all uninsured are included this raises the total to 8.4 million Americans. This is in stark contrast to the figure of 46 million that is often expressed by politicians and the media in their count of the uninsured.
It is possible that the explanation for the overwhelming level of satisfaction with health coverage among Americans' - even including the uninsured - is that the term "uninsured" may be misleading. Being without insurance does not necessarily mean that someone is going without health care. Some of the uninsured who are dissatisfied are covered through the government’s Medicaid program. Because Medicaid cannot exclude people due to pre-existing conditions, many of those who are in effect covered by Medicaid do not register until they become ill - even though they haven't joined the program, they are in effect insured at all times. A good portion of the remaining are illegal aliens.
When so many people are already so happy with the status quo, it would be a mistake to try to fundamentally alter the system. A more targeted and substantially cheaper reform could deal with those who are dissatisfied, instead of nationalized health care. There is a real danger that the majority of Americans who are currently satisfied will become dissatisfied. The push to pass something speedily in one giant reform is fated to failure.