“Media Malaise”: Explaining Personal Optimism and Societal Pessimism About Health Care

Abstract

Respondents' tendency to evaluate their own medical care favorably but to be quite critical of American health care as a whole suggests that people rely more heavily on media coverage in assessing society-wide care than in evaluating their own lives.Recent surveys have contradicted the conventional wisdom that "the grass is greener on the other side of the street": It appears that Americans often feel optimistic about their personal lives and futures, but quite the opposite about society as a whole. In this article we discuss the phenomenon and three possible explanations, along with evidence from a sample of Ohio residents on health care issues that supports an explanation relating to media coverage of those issues.Numerous polls and surveys show that Americans find that the "grass is greener in my own yard" on a variety of issues. In a Gallup survey of January 1981, only 19 percent of respondents were satisfied with how things were going in the country. Yet 83 percent expressed satisfaction with their own personal lives (13).In a continuing survey by the Louis Harris firm, those reporting a great deal of confidence in higher education declined from 61 percent in a 1966 sample to 36 percent in a 1980 sample. The number of people reporting a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in public schools as a whole dropped from 60 percent in 1973 to 40 percent in 1981, while the number of those showing very little or no confidence in public schools rose from 11 percent in 1973 to 25 percent in

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