Older Americans, including Baby Boomers, vote in large numbers. More than half of voters in the 2020 election were 50 or older. With the general election coming up in a few months, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) commissioned a survey of 2,500 Americans aged 50 and above about their opinions on 26 health-related issues. It was conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.
What are older Americans’ top health concerns? They are not necessarily what you would expect. The biggest concern of Americans aged 50 and above is the cost of long-term care (56.3%). That is followed closely by the cost of medical care (56.2%), the cost of drugs (54.3%), the cost of health insurance or Medicare (52.1%) and the cost of dental care (44.6%). The only surprise is that the proportions of voters concerned about costs were not higher. Liberal voters were more concerned about cost (68%) than independents (56%) or conservative voters (51%).
Older Americans were also concerned about quality, including access to quality long term care (38.1%), health care quality (33.7%), the quality of health information (33.2%) and access to quality mental health care (29.2%).
Issues related to growing older are a concern for older people. Nearly one-third (31.2%) are worried about poverty (I assume their own rather than societal poverty). Being able to age in place is also a concern for more than one-quarter of older voters (27.6%).
Here is where it gets interesting: the things that older Americans do not seem to care about. They are not uniformly concerned about unequal access to health care. Just over one-quarter claimed it as a concern (26.9%). They are not worried about obesity (24.3%), neighborhood safety (24.1%) or fentanyl drug abuse (21.6%). Older Americans are not particularly concerned about age discrimination (21.5%), racial discrimination (18%), pollution (18.3%), alcohol use (11.2%) or cannabis use (10.6%). You could say older Americans are a self-oriented bunch. Or maybe they are too old to have bought into all the hype that the younger generation worries about.
Although the survey has some interesting points, much of it should be taken with a grain of salt. One red flag is that survey participants were fed a menu of 26 issues and asked to rate them. You can find the 26 issues and their results here. Some have little to do with health care.
Opinion polls are rarely unbiased. The issues tested, the questions asked, and the wording of the questions are all ways to bias a survey. Many (probably most) political opinion polls are not truly seeking opinions. Rather, they are hoping to shape opinions or tease out the words that get voters to agree with poll sponsors’ views. Some of these 26 issues surveyed appear to be an attempt to gauge which issues parties (mostly likely Democrats) could run on to influence likely voters. I suspect the pollsters were disappointed with older voters’ lukewarm responses on societal problems.
One question I have is how the researchers came up with these specific 26 issues? They supposedly used focus groups to identify them. It looks a lot like the pollsters were testing campaign issues to see which ones resonate with likely voters. Another concern about polls is a concept in research design known as the Hawthorne effect. That is when survey participants change their opinions because they’re being watched. People may respond in ways they are believe they are supposed to respond rather than what they actually believe about an issue. Or survey participants’ respond with answers they perceive how a good person would respond. The poll results are interesting nonetheless.
Further reading:
You can read a good summary in Yahoo!
The study was published in JAMA