Health care's big secret

Shhh. No one's supposed to know. [Link]

Eighty-nine percent of Americans are satisfied with their own personal medical care, according to an article in Regulation magazine this week. Of those with insurance who had suffered a serious illness during the last year, 93 percent were satisfied; 95 percent of those who suffered chronic illness were satisfied with their health care.

Those are some impressive numbers. Yet only 44 percent were satisfied with the overall quality of the American medical system. The reason is that most Americans seem to believe that lack of insurance for others means that those others receive no access to health care. The same survey showed that 88 percent of those surveyed thought the problem of the uninsured was either "critical" or "serious but not critical."

"If the insured come to believe that the uninsured are not that dissatisfied with their health care, it is extremely important," Jack Calfee, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told Fox News on Wednesday. "It could throw a real wild card into the whole health care debate."

The Regulation magazine article closely examines a survey released in October 2006 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, ABC News and USA Today. The survey is unique in that the publicly released data allowed analysis regarding how happy the uninsured are with their health care. While 93 percent of the insured say that they are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their own health care, fully 70 percent of the uninsured who indicated their level of satisfaction said the same thing.

Not what I expected.