Framing Universal Healthcare: Comparing the U.S., Canada, and Australia

• In Event: Poster Session: Health Policy and Politics & Information Technology and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Emerging Research in Health Policy and Politics

Abstract

The United States is the only advanced democracy that does not have universal healthcare coverage (UHC), yet it spends twice as much per capita on healthcare as other OECD countries with UHC. Additionally, tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy nationwide. Although the shortcomings of the United States healthcare system have been salient in many U.S. residents’ lives for a long time, the Covid-19 pandemic brought healthcare-related debates to the forefront of U.S. politics. Target 3.8 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals establishes a commitment to the implementation of UHC in all countries by 2030. To gain insight into where the U.S. stands on the trajectory of achieving this goal (if it is moving in this direction at all), this paper analyzes the paths of two other Western democracies that have implemented UHC decades ago. Specifically, I analyze newspaper editorials in Canada and Australia during the years prior to the national adoption of UHC in both countries to assess how publications framed the policy and how these frames changed over time. As part of the mass media, newspapers play a primary role in selectively directing attention to issues and setting the parameters for debate. The media both influences and is influenced by public opinion and elites. Thus, a content analysis of editorials can help us gauge the salience and presentation of certain opinions about UHC over time. I then compare the content analyses of the Canadian and Australian editorials from the 1960s and 1980s, respectively, with an analysis of U.S. editorials during the past five years. The goal of this paper is to highlight and compare the dominant frames (i.e., moral, economic, collective, individual, etc.) the media uses and has used to describe UHC used across these three countries and to better understand the future of U.S. healthcare reform by using a historical-comparative lens.

Author

• Ana Schugurensky, University of California, Irvine