Health Costs Top Public’s Concerns

Health care ranks fourth among national issues American voters care about, and people are most concerned about health care costs and lack of access to insurance, a recent Harvard School of Public Health survey found.

The study, entitled “Understanding The American Public’s Health Priorities: A 2006 Perspective,” appeared in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Health Affairs.

The latest paper was the fifth and final segment in a series that Professor of Health Policy and Management Robert J. Blendon has been working on since 2001 with the aim of publicizing the American peoples’ concerns regarding health care.

Blendon’s research analyzed how much importance Americans place on health care in relation to other national issues. In the 2006 poll, health care ranked fourth after the war in Iraq, the economy, and energy prices, but before terrorism, education, global warming, Social Security, poverty, and crime.

“We thought it was important for people who are in the health-care field and health policy world to know what the general public thought were the major health care problems,” said Blendon, who conducted the study with four other researchers.

He added that the poll was timed around the elections to gauge voter interest in health-care issues.

Pointing out that health care was considered more important than terrorism, which topped a 2001 survey, the authors wrote in the paper that “this consistent rating of health care among the top four concerns signifies that it is an issue of ongoing concern for the public, regardless of how high a priority policy-makers make it.”

According to the study, people surveyed said they perceived health care to be a second-tier issue for the government.

The poll found that within the issue of health care, the public was most concerned with high costs and lack of access. When Americans were asked which two health-care problems most required the government’s attention, 43 percent of those polled cited health-care costs and 34 percent cited people without access to insurance.

The authors noted that despite national hubbub over Medicare’s prescription drug benefits, it ranked a distant third with only 15 percent citing it among their top two concerns.