Is Andy Burnham betting his premiership on fixing social care?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
This is a Global Production.

**Jon** (0:05)
Andy Burnham unveils his latest plans to reform social care, where so many other prime ministers have gone before and failed to achieve anything.

**Lewis** (0:15)
Social care is as unjust and as inequitable and unfair as the American healthcare system. Ultimately, social care, if you're going to really deal with it, it's going to be really expensive.

**Jon** (0:29)
Will it this time be different?

**Andy Burnham** (0:31)
I think social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare. The vulnerable pay with everything, and it can completely leave them with nothing.

**Jon** (0:42)
That is quite the comparison to say that social care in this country is no better than American healthcare, where so many fall by the wayside if they haven't got the money to pay.

**Lewis** (0:56)
Many a prime minister have found their political authority rapidly spent when they've tried to fix the problem of social care. Will Andy Burnham just be another? Welcome to The News Agents.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:15)
The News Agents.

**Jon** (1:16)
It's Jon.

**Lewis** (1:17)
It's Lewis.
This is a speech that I think everyone knew was going to come quite early in the Burnham Premiership because it is one thing that Andy Burnham has cared about for a long time, i.e. the problem of social care. When he was Health Secretary, at the tail end of the last Labour government, he tried to affect some reform by his own admission in the speech today. It was a bit too late in the day for that government who's trying to get cross-party cooperation. It didn't happen. He has signaled today, among other things, that he is potentially at some point willing to raise taxes to pay for a better elderly care system. As Jon said, and we played that clip at the start, making that very arresting comparison, which I think is absolutely spot-on, by the way, that social care is as unjust and as inequitable and unfair as the American healthcare system. Except, of course, there is an even more stark and glaring juxtaposition in the UK, because we have the opposite of the American healthcare system in the NHS. What we have is basically a system where, if you have a healthcare problem of almost any description or kind, the NHS, however imperfect it can be and however sometimes you might have to wait for care and it's rationed or whatever, but ultimately you will be able to get some care free at the point of use. Unless, of course, you end up with something like dementia or some other problem connected to your old age, and it means you have to move into a care home where suddenly, unless you have assets of less than £23,000 or so, you yourself are expected to pick up the entire tab, which has led to the financial ruin of many families.

**Jon** (2:56)
Yeah.
I think that it's just worth dwelling on the attempts to change the health care system in America. Because if that's the comparison you're making, then the obvious person you would compare Burnham to now is Barack Obama when he was trying to reform health care and introduced Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, which took a real political toll on Obama, where he was saying that, look, we've got millions of people in America who don't have any health insurance at all. Unless they turn up in a hospital in an emergency room with an emergency, they're not going to be treated essentially.
You have in America now people who, if they've got lousy insurance, still struggle to get the basics of, if you need insulin because you're diabetic and you haven't got the right insurance policy. The number of times I stood behind people in a queues at pharmacies where they would say, right, well, your insurance cover gives you so much, but you've still got to pay $140 for this pit of medicine. They say, I haven't got $140. The pharmacist says, well, I'm very sorry, then you can't have it. Now, Obama nearly was taken apart by Obamacare. However, Donald Trump has promised to reform it and change it, and actually, it is an enduring symbol of Obama's success that the Affordable Care Act is still there and their Republicans have not been able to find anything that would politically be as acceptable to so many Americans. So it's high risks, but it's high rewards as well.

**Lewis** (4:36)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I thought that comparison that he made with American healthcare was deeply interesting, not least because exactly, Jon, it brought to mind exactly that sort of 2009-10 period with Obama where there was huge public support for reforming healthcare, given that so many tens of millions of Americans were completely ineligible basically for healthcare, in some cases, literally ineligible to even get insurance if they had preexisting conditions, perfectly legal for insurance companies to refuse to insure someone because they had a preexisting health condition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it was used in those early days tremendously successfully by the Republicans, also the Tea Party movement, which was incubating that time. I was doing an internship in Washington that time. I remember it so vividly, those first Tea Party protests and manning the phones in this Congresswoman's office I was working in.