Americans think health care is one of the nation’s top problems, two new polls have found.
Nearly a quarter of Americans said health care is the most important issue facing the country today, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. It beat out the economy (15%), immigration (11%), foreign policy (8%) and Donald Trump (8%). Fewer than 5% named each of several other issues, like the environment, civil rights, government spending and education.
About one-third of Democrats said health care was the top issue, while 22% of independents did, the CNN poll found. Only 18% of Republicans felt this way, even though Congressional Republicans spent much of this year trying to overhaul Obamacare. The effort stalled in the Senate last month.
In a Gallup poll also released Thursday, 17% of Americans identified health care as the nation’s biggest problem. While dissatisfaction with the government/poor leadership took the top spot, health care beat out unemployment and jobs by more than two-to-one and the economy by nearly three-to-one.
Republicans and Democrats were nearly tied in naming health care as the most important problem, with 21% of the GOP and 19% of Democrats mentioning it, Gallup found.
The majority of Americans (56%) want the two parties to work together to make changes to health care policy, according to CNN’s survey. The rest are divided: Just over one in five said the GOP should both stop trying to repeal Obamacare completely (21%), and the same share said Republicans should keep trying to repeal it anyway (21%).
CNN’s Ryan Struyk and Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
