title: Americans' views of health care costs, access, and quality.
abstract: For more than two decades, polls have shown that Americans are dissatisfied with their current health care system. However, the public's views on how to change the current system are more conflicted than often suggested by individual poll results. At the same time, Americans are both dissatisfied with the current health care system and relatively satisfied with their own health care arrangements. As a result of the conflict between these views and the public's distrust of government, there often is a wide gap between the public's support for a set of principles concerning what needs to be done about the overall problems facing the nation's health care system and their support for specific policies designed to achieve those goals.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115, USA. rblendon@hsph.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Robert J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Blendon
authors.forename: Mollyann
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brodie
authors.forename: John M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Benson
authors.forename: Drew E
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Altman
authors.forename: Tami
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Buhr
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D017048:Health Care Costs; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D008318:Malpractice; D008484:Medicaid; D017057:Medically Uninsured; D006278:Medicare; D011639:Public Opinion; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D035502:Trust; D014481:United States; D019472:Universal Health Insurance