One-Third Of Americans Say The Health Care System Doesn't Work Well For Them

The chart above is from a rather large survey done by the Gallup Poll, of a random national sample of 110,835 adults between March 21st and October 31st of this year (and has a tiny 1 point margin of error). The headline Gallup gave the release of this survey was "Americans Satisfied With How Health System Works For Them".

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but my first reaction was just the opposite. The thing that stuck out to me was that a third of the U.S. population (1 out of 3, or about 110 million Americans) said the health care system does not work well for them. That's a huge percentage of the population -- and the question wasn't about Obamacare, but the health care system in general.

Obamacare did improve some things about our broken health care system, but it's obvious that it fell short of fixing the system to work for all Americans. It doesn't cover all Americans with health insurance, hasn't brought down the cost of health care, and although it has slowed the rise of insurance premium prices, it has not lowered them. More work remains to be done -- and I think the best way to cover everyone and reduce the costs of medical care would be to go to a government-run, single-payer health insurance system.

The new Republican Congress is not going to do that though. They are talking about doing just the opposite -- repealing Obamacare and going back to the horribly inadequate and broken system of the past. They'd better think twice about that, since only a minority, mainly their base voters, want to do that. The chart below shows most Americans want to keep Obamacare (and a majority of those would like to make it even better).

The bottom chart is the Rasmussen Poll done on October 17th and 18th of a random national sample of 1,000 likely voters, with a margin of error of 3 points.