The Coronavirus Crisis Will Force Us to Reconsider Universal Health Care

A daily Covid-19 update from Andy Slavitt, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Photo from AFP via Getty Images

Today I talked to a dozen health care experts of widely differing views on what we should do. I also started chasing my biggest question: Will the Covid-19 crisis cause us to focus on providing health care for all?

There is a lot of “expert chatter” about opening the economy instead of waiting for adequate testing and readiness. The logic is that time is destroying the economy and potential for a comeback. They make reasonable points. Small businesses have 27 days of cash. Other medical problems loom. Many people are lower risk.

One strange and consistent thing about everyone who argues we need to open is that we can’t count on a vaccine. They make that argument by pointing to “evidence” that we can’t create a vaccine for many other infectious diseases (like HIV). Thus we might as well open sooner.

Let me digress about a vaccine. You can find evidence to find whatever fits your narrative:

“It’s easy — we are very close”

“It is 18 months away”

“It will take years”

I don’t know which is right, but one thing I do know is what some people believe depends on the narrative they want to convey.

I’m not discounting this argument that we can’t count on a vaccine, or the huge frustration with the state of the economy and unemployment. It’s rough. I’d love to change it. But here’s the thing — the Federal Government doesn’t get to decide.

Trump thinks he “shut down the economy.” He didn’t. We did. For our own safety. Americans and their state and local leaders acted to save lives. Likewise “we” are the only people that can “open” the economy. How fast we spend money, how quickly employers hire, how eager people are to restart small businesses — or even whether we send our kids to school — depends on how safe we feel.

So how do we feel?

Americans are pretty clear. They want to do the right thing and are doing the right thing. And Americans are willing to continue to do it for some time. Even at great sacrifice. Americans have saved hundreds of thousands of lives by following #StayHome guidance. The economy can come back. Those lives would have been lost forever. Even with these measures in place, we have lost 50,000 people — likely more — 80% of whom don’t know who infected them. This means thousands of people have infected people and never knew it. And people don’t want that. By the way, New York is now well-past the number of deaths some internal Trump Administration sources predicted.

The Kaiser Family Foundation had an enlightening study on American’s attitudes towards social distancing and opening up the economy which I discussed yesterday: