When it comes to health insurance, your own grass appears greener. According to a new survey, most people like their own coverage, but express little love for the system as a whole.
The poll, conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard Chan School, surveyed residents in seven states: Florida, Kansas, New Jersey, Texas, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Ohio. About 1,000 people were polled in each state.
A third of all of those polled rated their own health coverage as "excellent," while an additional 46 percent rated it as "good." Only 14 percent rated it as "fair," and only 4 percent called it "poor."
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In contrast, more than 40 percent of those polled gave fair or poor reviews to the overall health care system in their states.
Those with incomes below $25,000 were more likely to give their coverage negative reviews, with 10 percent calling their care poor and 24 percent calling it fair. Still, that only amounts to just over a third of low-income people who give their coverage bad or mediocre reviews.
That doesn't mean that people won't concede that their medical costs are tough to cover. Just over a quarter of those polled reported having a serious financial problem as a result of health care costs, and 29 percent said that health care costs were "unreasonable," although the majority (60 percent) said they were reasonable.
The survey also sought to gauge perceptions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), and what effect people believe the health law has had on their care and that of others.
35 percent of those polled said the law had helped people in their area. 27 percent said it had hurt people, while 14 percent said their care had gotten better in the past two years. 9 percent said it had gotten worse.
Surprisingly, however, 25 percent claimed that Obamacare had directly hurt them, while 15 percent said it had directly helped them.
However, there are clearly far more people whose costs have gone up in the past two years than those whose costs have gone down. While 34 percent of respondents said their care has become less affordable, only 9 percent said that it had become more affordable.
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