I'll discuss each of these areas in turn. Satisfaction with the current system. Most citizens are reasonably satisfied with how well the health care system is meeting their own needs. However, they are far less satisfied with how well the system is meeting society's needs. Consequently, the political power of the movement for health care reform is driven more by perceptions of how the system fails to promote the public interest than by widespread dissatisfaction with the system's impact on oneself.
National polls show that citizens are very dissatisfied with the cost of health care.
Questions dealing with cost should try to make these distinctions. I am skeptical of the value of questions about cost for two reasons. One is that respondents typically feel that almost everything in life costs more than it should, and so questions on health care may simply be tapping this general orientation. The second is that since most citizens have health insurance paid by employers with relatively small employee contributions, they do not actually see their costs in the same way that they see the cost of their housing or transportation. This makes questions about costs difficult to interpret.