Interactions between Political Ideologies and Healthcare Reform

Improving the American healthcare system has consistently predominated the domestic policy agenda in the United States for decades. However, physicians have traditionally played a small role in the U.S. legislative process despite their direct observations of the obstacles that cost, access, and quality can have on their patients and their care. The goal of this study was to examine the relationship between physician political ideological preferences and health policy reform options.

Highlights

• Physicians are frontline observers of cracks in the healthcare system.
• Policy reforms include a nationalized plan, public option, and free market reform.
• Political ideology contributes to physician policy reform preference.
• Variation of reform preference among cost, quality, and access suggests further nuance.

Methods

We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 3,001 currently practicing U.S. physicians to predict how self-identification as liberal, moderate, or conservative impacted a physician’s policy preferences under the domains of cost, access, and quality.

Results

A total of 536 (18.8%) out of 3,001 physicians responded to the survey. Overall, 32% of physicians identified as liberal, 43% as moderate, and 22% as conservative.

Conclusion

Liberal-identifying physicians favored traditionally liberal reform ideas (a national health plan or public option), while conservative physicians preferred conservative policies (free market optimization). However, variation within political groups and domains of healthcare suggest that no single reform policy will be unanimously supported by every physician within a political group. Nonetheless, physicians are unanimously dissatisfied with the state of our current system, and physician-supported healthcare reform should be a national priority.