Nothing quite exposes the inequalities that exist in American society more than the health care system. It’s a complex combination of private insurance, public programs and politics that drives up costs, creating significant barriers to lifesaving medical treatment for large segments of the population. In America, access to quality health care often depends on income, employment and status.
Robert Hughes, professor of business ethics and legal studies at Wharton, is an advocate for universal health care coverage. Drawing deeply on his research in philosophy, Hughes believes that equal access to medical care is beneficial for both liberty and social stability. Health, he says, should not be tied to wealth.
“I think it’s very disturbing that people have to go to GoFundMe in order to get their medical treatments paid for. It creates a power imbalance,” he said, referring to the crowdsourcing platform used to help raise money for patient bills. “That’s why I say that truly universal health care would be good for people’s liberty. Because you’re not really free if you’re depending on charity, especially discretionary charity like the kind you see on GoFundMe, for a basic need like health care.”
Hughes recently joined the Wharton Business Daily radio show on SiriusXM to discuss universal health care in the context of the presidential election. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.) President-elect Joe Biden has said he will protect and rebuild the Affordable Care Act, which has been under attack since it was enacted in 2010 under President Barack Obama.
The ACA, commonly referred to as Obamacare, brought the U.S. closer to providing universal health care through subsidized private health insurance, but Hughes said there’s still a wide gap. He believes policymakers should ensure that everyone has coverage and access to the same needed treatments.
“It’s very disturbing that people have to go to GoFundMe in order to get their medical treatments paid for. It creates a power imbalance.”
“I think it’s totally feasible for us to change the health care system, if we all were willing to do the right thing. But we’re not all willing to do the right thing,” Hughes said.
The professor argued the case for universal health care in a paper titled “Egalitarian Provision of Necessary Medical Treatment,” which was published last year in the Journal of Ethics. (The author-accepted version is here.) He examined the health care systems of the U.K., Australia and Canada, concluding that Canada’s single-payer system is the most advantageous for the U.S.
Private insurance would still exist under such a setup, but it could not be used to pay for treatments already covered under universal health care. This provision would eliminate wealth as the controlling factor in health.
“I don’t understand why there’s so much resistance to the idea of truly universal health insurance in the United States, given that this is something that other industrial countries just do,” Hughes said.
He acknowledged that the U.S. doesn’t have the “political will” to change a system that’s been entrenched since the end of World War II, when employers began offering health insurance to their workers instead of higher wages.
“We can’t wave a magic wand and go back to 1946,” he said. “I don’t see the United States completely uprooting all these insurances. And that means we might need to create a model that keeps a lot of what we have, making it more accessible to more people, rather than creating all new institutions from scratch.”
Knowledge at Wharton interviewed Hughes last year about his paper. For an in-depth look into his research and advocacy, read the interview here.
