Aarhus University
New research from Aarhus BSS at Aarhus University explains why healthcare costs are running out of control, while costs to unemployment protection are kept in line.
The answer is found deep in our psychology, where powerful
intuitions lead us to view illness as the result of bad luck and worthy of
help.
Illness and unemployment are two types of ordinary risks to
which we are all exposed.
But from a historical perspective, unemployment and illness
represent two very different types of risks.
Unemployment came about as a result of the industrialisation,
while illness is something the human species has faced for millions of years.
This difference is reflected in current-day political attitudes.
"People across countries are very positive towards the healthcare sector, but are not necessarily that inclined to give money to the unemployed. Why do people generally prefer helping the ill and not the unemployed?" This is the question posed by two professors in political science, Carsten Jensen and Michael Bang Petersen, from Aarhus University.
Using techniques to uncover people's implicit intuitions, the
researchers explored the fundamental differences behind our attitudes towards
unemployment benefits and healthcare.
According to the researchers, the differences may be found in
the evolutionary history of our species.
"For millions of years, a need for health care reflected
accidents such as broken legs or random infections. Evolution could therefore
have built our psychology to think about illnesses in this way, as something we
have no control over. People everywhere seem to have this deep-seated intuition
that ill people are unfortunate and deserve to be helped," Michael Bang
Petersen explains.
Agreement
across countries and political ideologies
Even countries like the US, which you would normally not
associate with the term welfare state, healthcare costs are enormous.
The researchers did research in both Denmark, the US and Japan
and found that everywhere people intuitively believed that people who fall ill
are unlucky, while unemployed people have brought it on themselves.
"Because we have this psychological tendency to regard
people who are ill as unlucky, people's attitude towards the sick are extremely
difficult to change," Carsten Jensen explains.
In modern societies, more people die from lifestyle diseases
than from broken legs and infections, and there are considerable socio-economic
differences in who will suffer from these lifestyle diseases.
But we continue to think of illness as random accidents. This
even applies across the political spectrum, where conservatives who normally
oppose government spending think of ill people has unfortunate and deserving of
care.
"The traditional attitudinal factors such as self-interest,
access to information and political ideology do not really matter in the
healthcare area," says Michael Bang Petersen and continues:
"When it comes to healthcare, everyone seem united in the
belief that people who are ill are unlucky and need help. This means that the
policies in the areas of health care and unemployment are very different, as we
all more or less agree on the goal in healthcare, while we deeply disagree on
whether or not unemployed people deserve help."
Pressure
on the politicians
Increased healthcare spending is often explained by the supply
of health -- i.e. the costs of new technology and medicine.
But the researchers from Aarhus University argue that when it
comes to the rising costs of healthcare, we are also dealing with demand.
Politicians find it hard not to accommodate people's demand for
better healthcare, and no one wants to be seen as responsible for a health
scandal.