Recent polls conducted by the Gallup organization and Morning Consult reveal the top domestic concern for Americans is health care – ranking even higher than the economy.
Morning Consult authors wrote: “These results signal that voters don’t want to be reassured that things will go back to normal; they want to know their leaders have a plan to fix what was already broken.”
The Gallup authors describe a downward spiral: “Taken together, declining cost security and rising concern about future affordability point to health care as a serious and significant financial challenge facing Americans in 2026. If left unaddressed, these trends risk contributing to delayed care, poorer health outcomes, increased medical debt, greater health system burden and, by extension, even more cost.”
- The top concern of 16 domestic issues is health care, with 61% of Americans worrying a “great deal” about health care access and affordability. This ranking is higher than the economy (#2), inflation (#3), Federal spending and the budget (#4), crime and violence (#11), unemployment (#14) and illegal immigration (#15).
For the first time in five years, fewer than half of Americans can consistently afford health care. Only 49% of U.S. adults are now classified as “Cost Secure,” meaning they can afford access to quality care and to pay for visits and prescriptions. Those in the “Cost Secure” category have steadily declined from the peak of 61% in 2022. These findings reflect conditions prior to the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies
Just 38% of Black adults and 32% of Hispanic adults are classified as “Cost Secure”
Even wealthier households are affected, with one in five respondents living in households earning at least $180,000 classified as not “Cost Secure”
Adults aged 18-29 have experienced the sharpest decline of being “Cost Secure,” falling from 46% in 2021, when the poll’s Health Care Affordability Index began, to the current 32% feeling cost secure
Women and Americans with chronic conditions are likely to be less cost secure
The Morning Consult poll, commissioned by The Century Foundation, offered three choices (keep the current system, return to the health care system before 2025, or “reversing the Trump administration’s changes is not enough—we need to go further and fix the deeper problems with American health care”), a 38% plurality of respondents favored the third choice.
Former Cigna executive Wendell Potter stated that the seven largest for-profit health insurance conglomerates generated over $54 billion in net profits in 2025. A large source of these profits are the taxes and health insurance premiums that we and our employers pay, with the intention of having our medical bills paid, not going for billions of dollars in health insurance company profits. Think of the good that could result if those profits would actually be used to pay for our health care.
One final conclusion from The Century Foundation authors: “Americans across every partisan and demographic line want the federal government to take aggressive action to end corporate abuses in health care, with stopping hospital price-gouging at the top of the list. Voters want leaders to offer a credible plan that doesn’t merely tinker around the edges, but aggressively challenges the deeply broken status quo.” A health care system that prioritizes patients, not maximum profits, such as the Minnesota Health Plan and (improved) Medicare for All, would go a long way toward repairing our deeply broken status quo.
References:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/707732/healthcare-reclaims-top-spot-among-domestic-worries.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/710942/adults-ability-afford-healthcare-five-year-low.aspx
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/as-healthcare-costs-spiral/
Ken Engelhart, M.D.
Editor