Government Sponsored Health Care: A Cluster Profile of Supporters and Nonsupporters

While there has been a great deal of information revealing the public's dissatisfaction with our current health care system, there is little detailed analysis of these attitudes, and of the individuals who are most likely to support or reject such a system. This becomes more and more important as health policy debates shift toward a questioning of the viability of the current health care system and possible alterations to that system. In this paper we use cluster analytic methods on data collected from a public opinion survey of Louisiana residents to develop profiles of those people who support and who reject government-sponsored health care for all citizens. We then use these profiles to develop informed strategies for use by sociologists to impact health care policy. Much of the literature on attitudes toward human resource spending were confirmed by the multivariate analysis we performed. However, the cluster analysis illuminated the true diversity that exists. Quite often, rather weak statistical relationships tend to be overgeneralized. In attempting to develop these profiles, the cluster analysis allowed us to regain the diversity in a comprehensive fashion. We found that there are clear groupings of both supporters and nonsupporters, but probably of greater importance is that there is more similarity between supporters and nonsupporters than distinctive"Originally presented at the Southwestern Sociological Association's 1991 Annual Meeting, March 2730, 1991, San Antonio, Texas. Acknowledgment is kindly made to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for the use of data collected from the 1989 Louisiana Statewide Health Care Survey.