Early last year, the Right Care Alliance Patient Council distributed a 10-question survey to RCA’s membership. We called it the “What Worries You Most” survey, WWYM for short. We got over 1,000 responses, and have been working on assessing and crunching the data received since we closed the survey in on March 1, 2019.
Here are some highlights:
1) 7 out of 10 worry that they won’t be able to afford care
2) 8 out of 10 worry they won’t be able to afford their prescriptions
3) 5 out of 10 worry that they’ll lose their health coverage
4) 6 out of 10 worry they’ll be misdiagnosed
Some of the comments shared by people who took the survey:
1) “That money, not my well-being, is the primary goal.”
2) “That I will have to lose my home to qualify for Medicaid if I lose my coverage.”
3) “My kids won’t have access to medical care they need.”
4) “That my family will be bankrupted by medical costs.”
We put together a slide deck that shares the questions we asked, and charts of the responses (in percentages), which you can view on Google Slides here. Our Council is actively working to publish a journal article about our survey and its results – we’ll update on that when it’s accepted for publication.
As 2020 kicks off, the national conversation about America’s high-cost and variable-quality healthcare system is heating up as the Democratic primaries approach. In what’s sure to be a pivotal election year in the U.S., we’ll be sharing the worries that Americans shared with us via the WWYM survey – keep an eye on the Patient Council, the Right Care Alliance as a whole, and share your thoughts with us via email, or during a Patient Council meeting.