Everyone Really Loves Health Care

This chapter provides an analysis of party system attention to health care. Based on the issue incentive model, the importance of issue characteristics for understanding the rising party system attention to health care is clear. Health care is an obtrusive issue of great importance to everyone, so large, mainstream parties have a strong incentive to focus on the issue. However, as it is difficult to satisfy public demands, party attention is often an exercise in blame avoidance. Rapid progress within health-care technology has thus generated more party system attention to the issue because parties are struggling to meet public demands while controlling costs. Comparative differences in how much the attention to health care has increased can be explained to some extent by the comparative differences in health-care systems. The more responsibility for health care is concentrated with the state, the more party attention because parties have to address all kinds of questions about service provision. When responsibility is defused to societal actors, political parties attend less to the issue. Also, the analysis reveals no significant party differences in attention to the issue. There are no niche parties on the issue and no strong tendency for the large, mainstream parties to pay more attention to the issue than other parties do. Thus, health care seems to be an issue to which all political parties have to pay attention.