44% of Nurses Call US Healthcare a Crisis. The Public Puts It at 23%

Part of Nurse.org’s Nurse Voter Survey 2026, based on responses from 830 licensed nurses before the November midterms.

The Nurse Voter Survey didn’t ask nurses who they planned to vote for, but it did ask how they rate the US healthcare system they work in. Those answers can be compared with how the public rates the same system in national polling.

These findings reflect 830 licensed nurses who chose to take the Nurse.org survey, not a representative sample of all US nurses. Public figures for comparison come from Gallup’s November 2025 Health and Healthcare poll and Pew Research’s July 2026 survey of US adults, both named in the methodology. These comparisons show how respondents to differently conducted surveys answered similar questions; they don’t establish how all US nurses differ from the public.

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We asked nurses the same question Gallup asks the public: which description best fits the US healthcare system today. The two groups answered very differently.

Public figures are from Gallup’s November 3-25, 2025 Health and Healthcare poll. Columns sum to approximately 100%, subject to rounding. Source: Nurse.org; Gallup.

Combined, 96.3% of nurses said the system is either in crisis or has major problems. The public combined figure was 70%, per Gallup’s November 2025 poll. The 23% public figure for “state of crisis” was itself a record high in Gallup’s series on this question, which dates to 1994. On the other side of the scale, 26% of the public called the system’s problems “minor” and 3% said it has no problems; among nurses, those two answers together drew 3.0% (25 of 830).

Our survey didn’t ask what’s causing those problems. One retired nurse offered an explanation in a sentence: “We don’t have universal healthcare and we don’t have a system.”

We asked nurses to rate the overall quality of healthcare in the country, using the same four rating categories Gallup uses with the public. 34.6% of nurses said excellent or good. 46% of the public said the same, per Gallup’s healthcare trend page.

The public “excellent or good” combined figure (46%) is up from 44% in 2024. Columns sum to approximately 100%, subject to rounding. Source: Nurse.org, Nurse Voter Survey 2026; Gallup Health and Healthcare, November 3-25, 2025.

The largest percentage-point difference is in “only fair”: 41.7% of nurses selected it, compared with 32% of US adults. At the positive end, 11% of US adults called quality excellent, more than twice the 4.9% of nurses who did.

Nurses under 50 were less positive than those 50 and older: 25.0% called quality excellent or good, versus 38.9% of those 50 and older.

The bigger gap, though, was by party. 48.0% of Republican nurses in our survey rated quality as excellent or good, compared with 33.2% of independents and 29.0% of Democrats.

We also asked nurses what they think is the most urgent health problem facing the country right now. Cost topped the list by a wide margin, with no other category close.

Nurse figures are from a multiple-choice list; Gallup’s version is open-ended, so the public named their own answer. Gallup’s 15% Other row excludes four categories Gallup reported separately that were not on our list: government interference (5%), diabetes (2%), abortion (1%), and heart disease (1%). Cost and access rank first and second in both surveys; rankings below those two, and the percentages themselves, should be interpreted cautiously because the question formats differ. Source: Nurse.org, Nurse Voter Survey 2026; Gallup Health and Healthcare, November 3-25, 2025.

Cost tops the list for both groups. Access is second for both. Mental health ranked third for nurses at 15.2%. Gallup reported mental illness at 4% among US adults, though the different question formats mean those figures should not be treated as directly comparable.

Cost was the top answer in every party group among nurses in our survey. The party split showed up on access, the second-ranked problem overall: 32.7% of Democrats picked it, 19.7% of independents, and 11.0% of Republicans.

Nurses face healthcare costs as patients too. A Republican nurse in our survey wrote, “we pay so much for terrible coverage in an industry that we work in.”

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We asked nurses which issues will matter most to them when they vote this November, letting each pick up to three from a list of 16. Healthcare topped the list at 54.6%.

Percentages sum to more than 100% because nurses picked up to three. 823 nurses answered this question; the handful who said they definitely will not vote in November skipped it. Source: Nurse.org, Nurse Voter Survey 2026.

Pew’s July 2026 survey asked US adults a related question in two formats. On the closed-list version, with five options to pick from, 47% picked the economy, and 19% picked healthcare, putting healthcare second. On the open-ended version, where adults named their own answer, economic issues led there too (combined 27%, with cost of living the single largest at 14%). Healthcare drew 4%. The closed-list results below match our question format most closely:

Pew split the sample for this question; the closed-list version was shown to 1,761 US adults, with the five options rotated in order. “Other” write-ins broke down to government ethics or Trump (3%), Social Security (1%), all of the above (1%), and something else (3%). Pew did not publish a registered-voter breakdown for this version. Source: Pew Research Center.

The surveys measure different things. Ours asked nurses to pick up to three issues that matter when voting. Pew asked adults which one issue they most wanted congressional candidates to discuss. The percentages and rankings aren’t directly comparable.

In our survey, 60.9% of nurses picked at least one of inflation (31.8%), housing (29.6%), or jobs (18.2%); including taxes brings the figure to 69.5%. Those categories roughly match what Pew counts as “the economy,” which US adults picked as the top issue on both forms of Pew’s question (47% on the closed list).

Healthcare was the most-picked single category among nurses, at 54.6%, and it was the top pick in every party group, though at different rates: 61.3% of Democrats, 50.0% of independents, and 45.1% of Republicans. On Pew’s five-option question, healthcare ranked second at 19%, behind the economy. After healthcare, each party diverged. Democratic nurses most often picked civil rights and liberties (35.7%). Independents picked inflation and prices (38.0%). Republicans picked immigration (32.9%).

For 24 consecutive years, Gallup has ranked nurses the most honest profession in the United States. Their view of the US healthcare system is more critical than the public’s across every measure we could compare: 21 points more likely to call it in a state of crisis, 11 points less likely to rate its quality as excellent or good, 26 points more likely to say the system has major problems or is in crisis.

One retired nurse in our survey put it this way: “Our healthcare system is broken and non-sustainable. Our healthcare workers are struggling to carry the load not just with our caring for our patients but dealing with a system that does not care about the patients or its healthcare employees.”

Nurses bring professional experience to their judgments of healthcare. Among those who answered our survey, that perspective came with especially critical assessments of the system’s problems and quality.

More from the 2026 Nurse Voter Survey

🤔 Does your view of US healthcare match the public’s? Tell us in the comments below.

The figures in this piece are from the Nurse Voter Survey 2026, Nurse.org’s survey of 830 licensed nurses conducted September 1 through October 25, 2026. For the full methodology, sample characteristics, data cleaning, and the full survey results in question order, see our main results article.

Gallup public figures for the state-of-crisis, major-problems, and most-urgent-health-problem comparisons are from the West Health-Gallup 2025 release (fielded November 3-25, 2025, with 1,321 US adults; the state-of-crisis question was asked of 659 adults in Gallup’s Form A half-sample). The healthcare-quality figures are from the same November 2025 Gallup Poll Social Series field period, reported on Gallup’s healthcare trends. The state-of-crisis descriptor, the four-point system-health scale, and the four-category quality scale match the wording Gallup uses, which allows the direct percentage comparisons in those sections. The most-urgent-health-problem question is multiple choice in our survey and open-ended in Gallup’s; the direction of the answer matches, but the formats differ.

Pew public figures for the vote-issue comparison are from Pew’s July 2026 release, fielded July 6-12, 2026 among 3,554 US adults including 2,779 registered voters. Pew split the sample for the question about which issue adults most want candidates to discuss: half received a closed-list of five options (n=1,761 adults, the primary comparison in this piece); half received an open-ended version naming their own top issue. The question wording is identical across both forms: “What one issue would you most like to hear the candidates running for Congress in your district talk about during the campaign?” Our vote-issues question offered 16 prompted choices with up to three selections. Pew’s primary comparison offered five prompted choices plus Other, with one selection; Pew also tested an open-ended version separately. The format differences mean the percentages aren’t directly comparable; we focus on which issues rise to the top of each list. Our list of 16 was developed primarily from Statista’s monthly voter-issues tracker, with three categories added in August 2026, including government ethics and political reform after Pew’s July 2026 survey.

The 24-year Gallup honesty-and-ethics streak for nurses, and the 75% very-high-or-high rating, are from Gallup’s ethics poll fielded December 1-15, 2025 and released January 12, 2026.

Weighting the three major party groups by the optional party identification question equally shifts the crisis figure from 44.1% to 43.0%, the crisis-or-major figure from 96.3% to 96.0%, and the quality excellent-or-good figure from 34.6% to 36.7%. The direction of the comparisons with the Gallup public figures does not change.

Nurse.org Original Research