Pennsylvanians’ outlook on health care continues to worsen, according to Muhlenberg College’s 2026 Pennsylvania Health Poll.

Sixteen percent of respondents rated the quality of health care in the state as poor, which for the first time since Muhlenberg started asking that question surpassed the percentage that rated it as excellent, which was 13%. About the same percentage as last year, 37%, rated health care in the state as good, but fewer said it was fair and more said they weren’t sure.

Muhlenberg’s report is based on the college’s recent telephone survey of 500 adult Pennsylvanians. The survey lets respondents voice their opinions on issues such as health care quality, reliability of artificial intelligence making health decisions, the effect of politics on mental health and other topics.

This year, slightly fewer Pennsylvanians praised the health care they received. and slightly more rated the care they got as poor. Almost one-tenth said the quality of care they received was poor, more than double the percentage that answered that in 2025 or ’24. However, the vast majority, 64%, still said that the care they received was excellent or good.

Just over one-quarter of Pennsylvanians said they or someone in their household struggled to access health care in the last year, which was comparable to the previous year.

“It’s probably not surprising in an era where the cost of living is such an enormous issue for Pennsylvanians in general, that in the area of health care, that [unhappiness with health care] is acutely observed. Over a quarter of Pennsylvanians said they struggled to get care because of affordability concerns last year,” Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, said. “When we ask people, the greatest threat to public health in the state, the thing that they say in their own words, this is open-ended, the most common is affordability or access. That’s really significant.”

Politics

In addition to the state of health care, Muhlenberg also asked respondents how politics is impacting their mental health.

Midterm elections are coming up and in this age of constant polarization and politicization, many Pennsylvanians said politics is stressing them out, according to the poll. Forty-four percent said it was a major source of stress, 32% said it was a minor source of stress and only 22% said it was no source of stress at all. This was a significant increase in people saying it was a major source of stress, up 12 percentage points, and a significant decrease in those saying it caused no stress at all, down nine percentage points, compared with last year. However, these numbers were comparable to those collected in 2024, several months before the presidential election.

The groups who were most likely to say they weren’t stressed about politics were Republicans, Catholics and Protestants. The groups who were the most likely to report they were stressed about politics were Democrats, women, people 30 to 65 years of age, people of color and college-educated Catholics.

“It’s the midterm election in Pennsylvania; it’ll be a hot spot for contests this fall. Pennsylvania’s always front and center in American politics and I think of course that shows up to a degree in what we’re seeing here,” Borick said.

Most Pennsylvanians said they aren’t thrilled about Trump’s withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization at the beginning of this year. A total of 61% said they disagreed on some level with the move, 25% said they strongly agreed and 7% said they somewhat agreed with the move. A comparable proportion also believed that the move would negatively impact the U.S.’s preparedness for future pandemics.

And Pennsylvanians were somewhat more likely, 45% to 40%, to say they had absolutely no trust in federal Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. to handle the nation’s health care issues compared with the previous year. However, roughly the same percentage said they had a lot of trust in RFK Jr.

Artificial intelligence and data centers

Most Pennsylvanians trust their primary care doctor and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention more than they trust chatbots and learning language model-based AIs to provide accurate medical information and diagnosis, the survey found. About 84% of Pennsylvanians said they had a lot or some trust in their primary care physician to provide accurate medical diagnosis and treatment recommendations, compared with just 5% that said they had no trust at all.

Hardly any Pennsylvanians — just 6% — said they had a lot of trust in chatbots like ChatGPT to accurately diagnose them or recommend treatments. About 24% said they had some trust, 26% very little trust and the majority, 40%, said they had absolutely no trust at all.

“I think there’s a lot of suspicion, caution, concern about what kind of capabilities the technology has, the accuracy of those capabilities, and of course in an area like health where the ramifications are so serious, the level of trust might be slow to to be built and I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing in terms of the results we found,” Borick said.

Research has shown that chatbots can provide false, incomplete or misleading information. One study found that patients using AI for medical information over conventional diagnosis had a poorer understanding of the severity of their symptoms and more often than not failed to identify the actual condition they are experiencing. Some research has even found that people may prefer bad advice from an LLM over professional medical advice from a doctor.

At the same time, 22% said they had a lot of trust in the CDC to provide accurate health recommendations. Thirty-eight percent said they had some trust, but 37% said they had little or no trust in the CDC.

For the first time, the poll asked Pennsylvanians what they think about data centers, and most Pennsylvanians are not fans, with 21% saying they pose a crisis and 43% saying they pose a problem, but not a crisis. About 20% said these data centers posed no problem. With the exception of Catholics and those over 65 years old, who were the most unsure about them, the majority of Pennsylvanians thought data centers at least posed an issue.

Autism and vaccines

A record share of Pennsylvanians either believe vaccines cause autism or have suspicions it does. While 41% said they strongly disagreed that vaccines cause autism, 21% said they believed they put children at risk.

Republicans and people of color were most likely to say they believed that vaccines cause autism, but only slightly more than the general population. Democrats and political independents, people who are college educated, non-Christians, and women were significantly to somewhat more likely to say they disagreed that vaccines cause autism. Millennials were among those most likely to believe and not believe. Republicans, Protestants, men and people over 65 were most likely to say they were unsure.

The idea that vaccines cause autism originated due to a fraudulent and retracted study authored by a doctor from the United Kingdom whose medical license was later revoked. The overwhelming body of scientific research into these claims shows there is no causal or correlative link between vaccines and autism.