Who wants to pay more taxes to improve public health care?

Abstract

We study the factors that influence willingness to pay to improve public health care in 29 post-communist countries, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Eurasia using 2 up-to-date cross-sectional surveys conducted in 2010 and 2016 (N = 34 768). Three hypotheses received full degree of support through empirical analysis: increase in satisfaction with health care, university education, and higher level of wealth positively associated with willingness to pay in all regions. In comparison, having a higher level social trust and adhering to left-leaning ideological position strengthens support for public health care in Southern Europe and Eurasia only, while having a higher level of institutional trust strengthens support for public health care in Eastern Europe and Eurasia only.

Financing the welfare state in times of extreme crisis: public support for health care spending during the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany

“…More specifically, I probe attitudes towards increasing health care spending during the Corona pandemic by making use of novel survey data for Germany collected in three waves in April/May and November 2020 as well as May 2021. The paper speaks to recent scholarship on the relationship between trust, performance perceptions and willingness to pay for social policy (Habibov et al, 2018a(Habibov et al, , 2018bRoosma et al, 2014;Van Oorschot & Meuleman, 2012). It can also build on and expand existing work on determinants of individual-level attitudes towards health care (Jensen, 2011(Jensen, , 2012Missinne et al, 2013;Naumann, 2014;Wendt et al, 2010;Wendt et al, 2011), which has provided a wealth of insights about the individual (self-interest, ideology) and institutional determinants of attitudes.…”

“…There is a rich literature on the complex association between political trust and welfare state support that can only be briefly reviewed here (see Kumlin et al (2017) for a recent and more comprehensive overview). Generally speaking, researchers have identified a positive, self-reinforcing feedback relationship between political trust and more specific measures of welfare state performance on the one hand and individual willingness to support the welfare state and its further expansion on the other (Edlund, 2006;Gabriel & Trüdinger, 2011;Habibov et al, 2018aHabibov et al, , 2018bHabibov et al, 2019b;Hetherington, 2005;Kumlin, 2013;Lynch & Gollust, 2010;Rothstein et al, 2012;Rudolph & Evans, 2005;Svallfors, 2002;Wendt et al, 2010). Scholarship has studied both how generalized political trust might influence further support for the welfare state (Rothstein et al, 2012) as well as how performance perceptions of particular social policies in turn might increase general political trust (Cammett et al, 2016).…”

“…Finally, the empirical analysis will also probe whether general political trust is associated with support for additional spending on health care as some papers in the literature have suggested (Habibov et al, 2018a;Habibov et al, 2018b). The mechanism behind the association between general political trust and support for the welfare state includes, but also goes beyond performance perceptions of particular social policies.…”

The welfare state in really hard times: Political trust and satisfaction with the German healthcare system during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Lynch and Gollust (2010), using survey data from the US, argue that individual beliefs and perceptions of the fairness of the healthcare system matter more as determinants of policy preferences than indicators of self-interesta finding that is most relevant in the context of this article. In a string of articles that focus on Eastern European countries, Habibov and co-authors have shown that prevailing levels of institutional and social trust as well as individual perceptions of the quality of healthcare are systematically related to willingness to pay more taxes for healthcare provision (Habibov et al, 2017(Habibov et al, , 2018a(Habibov et al, , 2018b(Habibov et al, , 2019.…”

Ranking the Healthcare Resource Factors for Public Satisfaction with Health System in China—Based on the Grey Relational Analysis Models

“…Apart from dimensions of safety, effectiveness, responsiveness, affordability, accessibility, and patient-centeredness [15][16][17][18][19][20], public satisfaction is also a very important comprehensive indicator of the health system [1,6,14], because it includes not only users (the patients) but also non-users (the healthy population) in the system [7]. Hence, it can provide meaningful information (such as key factors of public satisfaction improvement) for health policy reform [21,22] and government's decisions making (such as fiscal expenditure allocation and healthcare service supplies) [23][24][25][26]. Since governments in modern societies usually play key roles in the health systems [6,14], the public's satisfaction with the health system is closely associated with the public satisfaction with and public trust in governments [23].…”