Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
7 Figures: NPR/Harvard Survey on Patients’ Perspectives on Health Care
7 Figures: NPR/Harvard Survey on Patients’ Perspectives on Health Care
Dec 20, 2025 8:53 PM

A new survey by NPR and Harvard University reports the self-reported experiences of health care consumers across the country, in states that have (New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon) and have not (Florida, Kansas, Texas) expanded Medicaid, and in one (Wisconsin) that did not have to expand Medicare.

Here are seven figures you should know from the report:

1. When asked about its effects on the people of their state, more than a third (35 percent) of adults say they believe national health reform has directly helped residents, while a similar proportion (27 percent) say they believe the law has directly harmed residents. On a more personal level, most (56 percent) Americans do not believe the Affordable Healthcare Act (i.e., Obamacare) has directly impacted them. Among those who believe it had an impact, more say it has directly hurt them (25 percent), as individuals, than those who say national health reform has directly helped them (15 percent).

2. One-third (33 percent) of adults in the U.S. believe the health care they receive is excellent and just under half (46 percent) say their care is good, while just over one in six (18 percent) say it is fair or poor.

3. Nearly three-fourths (74 percent) of adults in the U.S. believe the health care they receive has stayed about the same over the past two years, while less than a quarter (23 percent) believe it has gotten better or worse.

4. Most adults in the U.S. (60 percent) say the cost they personally pay for their health care is reasonable, while just under three in ten (29 percent) disagree, saying the amount they pay is unreasonable.

5. Even though most (55 percent) Americans reflect positively on their state’s health care system, saying it is excellent or good, few give their state top marks. Just one in six (17 percent) say the health care system in their state is excellent, while more than two in five (42 percent) adults in the U.S. say it is fair or poor.

6. Only 38 percent of adults in the U.S. had positive things to say about the country’s health care system, and fewer than one in ten (9 percent) gave it top marks. In contrast, more than three in five (61 percent) U.S. adults say the nation’s health care system is fair or poor.

7. One in seven (14 percent) adults in the U.S. says it has gotten harder to see a doctor in the past two years, whereas nearly three-quarters (74 percent) say their ability to see a doctor has stayed about the same. In contrast, just one in ten (10 percent) say it has gotten easier to see a provider in recent years.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
The death and resurrection of ‘The 1776 Report’ (full report text)
While I was reading The 1776 Report, it disappeared. The missioned to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States,” which found itself memory-holed by one of the initial executive orders President Joe Biden signed during his first day in office, expertly explains the American philosophy of liberty and applies it to the most threatening modern-day crises. For that reason, I’m giving an overview of its most significant points and posting...
Warrior for liberty: Rev. Maciej Zięba, O.P. (1954-2020)
Few people have the courage to resist a totalitarian system from within; fewer still have the intellectual and moral grounding to plant the seeds of its metamorphosis into a free and virtuous society. The world lost one such person on the last day of 2020. “A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Father Maciej Zięba, O.P., died in his native Wrocław, Poland, on December 31,” wrote George Weigel in First Things. The 66-year-old Dominican, who suffered from cancer,...
‘The road to smurfdom’: American mobocracy threatens our freedom
Between the riots of last spring and the recent storming of the U.S. Capitol, the forces of polarization appear stronger than ever, manifesting across American society with increasing energy and destruction. Despite all our talk of “unity,” the division only seems to fester, perpetuated by the spread of misinformation and partisan efforts to justify all sorts of reckless disregard. The various movements have their distinctions, to be sure. Each represents a unique set of grievances among a subset of the...
Celebrating the work of delivery drivers
Online shopping has soared in the wake of COVID-19, boosting merce giants like Amazon and Walmart, and creating record growth for UPS and FedEx. While some question the moral legitimacy of these gains, others celebrate the market’s ability to respond plex demands, innovating products and adapting supply chains to meet countless human needs. Yet we should also remember that such businesses are not mere machines to be retooled, adjusted, and manipulated for materialistic purposes. Fundamentally, businesses are organisms and ecosystems...
Today is Lord Acton’s 187th birthday. His philosophy should guide our next two centuries
Sunday January 10, 2021, is Lord Acton’s 187th birthday. This difficult era of a global pandemic, a crisis in institutions, and civil unrest seem strange times indeed to look back on the life and legacy of a Victorian historian of ideas – but, as Lord Acton himself remarked, “if the Past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and surest emancipation.” The freedom of the historian is the freedom to look beyond our...
As children thrive at charter schools, progressives threaten their future
The COVID-19 global pandemic has exposed significant fault lines in America’s educational system, testing moral and mitments among parents, teachers, school administrators, and politicians alike. Punctuated by media battles between teachers’ unions, governors, and the president, one thing has e increasingly clear: America’s public education system is far too vulnerable to the whims of partisanship and far too insulated from the promises of reform. Among individual families, however, the pandemic may be driving a cultural awakening about the value of...
Rev. Robert Sirico: Reject ‘moral relativism’ over the Capitol riot
Rev. Robert Sirico, the president and co-founder of the Acton Institute, discussed how Christians should respond to the Capitol riot in a segment of EWTN’s The World Over dedicated to “political protests and lawlessness.” “Why are we seeing more frequent, violent political protests here in the U.S., and what needs to be done about this rioting?” host Raymond Arroyo asked his guests, Rev. Sirico and Catholic League President Bill Donohue. “We need to be outraged – morally outraged – by...
Free video conference celebrates Sir Roger Scruton on the first anniversary of his death
Sir Roger Scruton passed away on January 12, 2020 – one year ago today. On the first anniversary of his death, many of his closest friends and colleagues will celebrate his memory and his incalculable contribution to conservatism in a free, online conference titled, “Remembering Roger Scruton.” Scruton’s death from cancer at the age of 75 deprived the worldwide conservative movement of his intellectual prowess, incisive and precise philosophical distinctions, and playfully delightful expressions. He produced an array of books,...
New issue of Journal of Markets & Morality (Vol. 23, No. 2) released
The newest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, vol. 23, no. 2 (2020), has been released. This issue’s memorates the centennial of Abraham Kuyper’s death in 1920. The issue is guest edited by Jessica Joustra, the assistant professor of religion and theology at Redeemer University in Toronto, and Robert Joustra, the associate professor of politics and international studies at Redeemer. In their editorial in this issue, they provocatively cast Kuyper in a mischievous bative light: Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920),...
Solzhenitsyn: Prophet to America
Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson, eds. University of Notre Dame Press. 2020. 392 pages. English literature scholar Ed Ericson told a story about teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to American undergrads, who knew plenty about the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and other dehumanized minorities but next to nothing about the genocidal history of the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes. Ericson, who worked tirelessly to widen Solzhenitsyn’s audience in...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved