Should health care be viewed as a basic right? Should it be paid for by the government? Or should people be responsible for paying for health care on their own?
Atul Gawande, a surgeon and professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, explored these questions in the October 2, 2017 issue of The New Yorker, as the battle over whether to repeal, replace, or repair the Affordable Care Act (ACA) continues. He was also interviewed about the topic on CBS’ Face the Nation and on NPR.
Interviewing a handful of people who he’d grown up with in Athens, Ohio, Gawande elicited a range of responses as to how much, or how little, the government should be involved in providing health care in America. When he asked his friends whether they believe health care is a right, “A surprising number said ‘no,’ even friends who’d been bankrupted by health care costs, because they believed that it was a really a way to ask them to pay more for other people, while they couldn’t afford their [own] health care costs,” he told CBS.
Although the ACA was aimed at providing all Americans with access to health care, “the prospects and costs for health care in America still vary wildly, and incomprehensibly,” Gawande wrote in the New Yorker. “Few want the system we have, but many fear losing what we’ve got. And we disagree profoundly about where we want to go.”
Read the New Yorker article: Is Health Care a Right?
Watch the CBS interview: Is health care a right for the American people?
Listen to an NPR interview: Boston Surgeon And ‘New Yorker’ Writer Explores Whether Health Care Is A Right