Do you think the U.S. has high-quality care at affordable prices? If you’re with the majority of Americans today, the answer to that question is no.
According to a Gallup survey, only 48% of respondents think U.S. healthcare quality is “excellent/good.” Another 31% rated it as “only fair” and 21% said care quality is “poor” (a 6-point jump from last year’s survey). It’s the first time in more than two decades since Gallup launched the survey that a majority of people rated care quality as fair or poor.
One reason for the high level of dissatisfaction with U.S. healthcare is the cost. Only 24% of people surveyed were satisfied with the cost of healthcare in the country (although 56% were satisfied with what they pay personally). With costs continuing to rise much faster than wages, that dissatisfaction is unlikely to reverse anytime soon.
In its annual report on Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, the U.S. Federal Reserve found that almost 3 in 10 U.S. adults (28%) went without medical care in 2022 because they couldn’t afford it. Having insurance isn’t necessarily enough to guarantee that someone will be able to afford medical care either – while the number of people skipping medical treatments due to cost is higher among the uninsured (42%), more than 1 in 4 insured adults (26%) did not get care they need because they couldn’t afford it.
Efforts to make healthcare more affordable and improve the quality are underway. But as these surveys show, they’re not happening fast enough. We need more than just the incremental changes of past VBC efforts to minimize the rise in healthcare costs. We need big changes that will actually bend the cost curve in the other direction without sacrificing care quality.
There are no spectators in the efforts to improve care quality and lower costs – it will take ALL of us to affect change. The Value Revolution is Now.
