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By Ros Krasny
BOSTON | Fri Oct 21, 2011 6:00pm EDT
BOSTON (Reuters) - Most Massachusetts residents want their state government to take action to reduce high healthcare costs that they blame on drug and insurance companies charging too much, a survey showed on Friday.
Massachusetts has almost universal healthcare insurance coverage thanks to a 2006 law driven by current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney when he was state governor.
Romney's rivals for the party's 2012 nomination have criticized the law as a government overreach that served as a pattern for the 2010 national healthcare law championed by Democratic President Barack Obama.
Eighty-eight percent of the 1,000 Massachusetts residents questioned in the poll in September said the state government should take "major action" to address rising costs.
Only 48 percent expressed confidence that the state government could take steps to reduce future healthcare costs, with Democrats more confident than Republicans.
Asked for reasons why costs are so high, survey respondents cited drug companies and insurance companies charging too much money, as well as waste and fraud in the healthcare system, hospitals charging too much, and people not taking good care of their health.
The poll, conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health for the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, found that 78 percent of respondents viewed the high cost of healthcare as either a crisis (25 percent) or a major problem (53 percent).
The Massachusetts law, popular in the state, did little to curb rising costs. That effort is now under way in the state legislature and by current Governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat.
"There is clear, overwhelming and bipartisan support to control healthcare costs in Massachusetts," said Nancy Turnbull, Harvard School of Public Health's associate dean.
"People ... support government taking big action, but are skeptical that it's going to work," added Robert Blendon, professor of social policy at Harvard School of Public Health, lead author of a report on the survey.
(Reporting by Ros Krasny; Editing by Will Dunham)
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