Voters favor Clinton on health policy

When it comes to healthcare policy, voters believe Hillary Clinton is more likely to do a better job of dealing with the issues than Donald Trump. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) polled 1,200 voters—Democrats, Republicans and Independents—on nine top health policy issues and found that Clinton outranked Trump on all nine issues, including addressing addiction in the United States.

It’s clear that the heroin and opioid crisis is a concern, with 41% of respondents saying they would like to see the presidential candidates address it during their campaigns. Addiction outranked women’s reproductive health, the Zika virus and HIV/AIDS as a priority for voters. Along party lines, Democrats are more likely (51%) than Independents (35%) and Republicans (34%) to identify the heroin and opioid crisis as a concern.

When comparing opinions about each candidate’s ability to address the crisis, KFF found that 51% of respondents believe Clinton would do a better job to address it, and 39% believe Trump would do a better job.

KFF also notes that large majorities of voters from each political party say they trust their party’s candidate more across all health issues. By comparison, 73% of Republicans trust Trump on the heroin and opioid crisis, while 88% of Democrats trust Clinton. Independents favor Trump by 1%.

The KFF poll also found that 63% respondents believe that it’s very or somewhat important for them to be able to access information on mental health and substance use disorder treatment services, however only 41% indicate that such information is available to them online. Among the 1,200 respondents, 9% say that they have accessed online information about behavioral health treatment services.

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Read the full KFF survey here.