Growing Support for Shared and Personal Responsibility in Health Care

Fear is a powerful force. Families fear the disappearance of affordable health insurance, employers fear international competition while financing high and rising health care costs at home, and providers fear that they will not be able to deliver needed care for lack of funding. In short, just about everyone fears that our system will fall apart. Instead of taking action, many politicians remain fearful of tackling health care reform, since it crushed the Clintons and others before them.

But hope is an equally powerful force. And the hope is that there is growing bipartisan support for a health system based on shared responsibility -- with the individual, employers, and government all doing their fair share.

Shared responsibility with an individual requirement to purchase coverage is not a new idea. Leading academics and 16 Republican senators proposed an individual mandate approach to universal coverage during the Clinton era. But renewed interest has intensified since Ted Halstead and Michael Lind published their ideas about how it could be done in The Radical Center in 2001. Since then, an impressive array of thinkers and analysts has shared quite similar visions. We collect and publish their statements and provide references in this paper.

For the full paper, please see the attached PDF below.