Self-Rated and Social Determinants of Health Spending Attitudes in the United States

Self-rated and social determinants of health are associated with people’s health attitudes towards government spending on improving national health in the US. We used data from eight biennial nationally representative General Social Surveys from 2004 to 2018 (n = 21116) to assess the determinants of health spending attitudes among US adults through a multivariate logistic regression technique. We found that more than three quarters of adults responded that government health spending was ‘too little’ for improving and protecting American health. We also found that adults those with ‘fair’ self-rated health were more likely to respond ‘too little’ or negative about health spending after adjusting for socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors and political regimes. This result suggests exploring individual-specific reasons associated with this negative attitude to restructure health spending priorities in the US.