Americans Like Their Private Insurance
If you ask people for their views on the cost of their health care, people on Medicare are much more likely to be satisfied than people on private insurance. In a Gallup poll in 2018, 51% of people on private insurance said they were satisfied with the total cost they paid. That was much lower than the 70% of satisfied people on Medicare or Medicaid.
If you ask people for their views on health insurance corporations, they tend to be negative. In a 2015 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 44% said they had a favorable view of these companies, while 51% said they had an unfavorable view.
Sanders can point to figures like these to bolster his case.
But the story changes when you ask people for their views on their own private insurance plans rather than about insurance companies or costs. In poll after poll, for years, Americans using such plans have expressed positive opinions.
...
More than 155 million Americans received private coverage through employers in 2017, or about 58% of people under age 65.
Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation asked people who have employer plans to give their coverage a grade. Twenty-five percent gave it an "A," or excellent; 43% said "B," or good. These results -- about two-thirds rating their employer coverage positively -- have been quite consistent dating back to 1997, according to data provided to CNN by Kaiser.
In a Gallup poll last year, 85% of people who used private insurance said the quality of their health care was "excellent" or "good," versus 79% of people on Medicare or Medicaid. (Gallup combined the Medicare and Medicaid groups in its report on the poll.) When people were asked about their coverage itself rather than the quality of care, 79% of people on Medicare or Medicaid said it was excellent or good, versus 70% of people on private insurance.
