Bob Blendon, an Expert Giant in Health Policy and Polling, Dies

Bob Blendon, ScD, a giant in the world of healthcare polling, died Wednesday, said officials from Harvard University in Boston.

“Bob contributed so much to health policy as an innovator in research on public opinion,” Paul Ginsburg, PhD, of the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy and Government Service and former vice chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), said Thursday in an email to MedPage Today.

Blendon was an emeritus professor of health policy and management at Harvard. He graduated from Marietta College in Ohio and earned an MBA at the University of Chicago and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where his focus was on health policy. Between 1987 and 1996, Blendon served as chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). While there, he also directed the Harvard Opinion Research Program, which focuses on better understanding of public knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about major social policy issues in the U.S. and other nations.

He also co-directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health project on understanding Americans’ Health Agenda, including a joint series with National Public Radio and Politico. Previously, he co-directed a special polling series with the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

“Bob was this rare combination of both larger-than-life and incredibly accessible,” Adrianna McIntyre, PhD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, one of Blendon’s many graduate students, said in an email. “His influence is most visible in the polling work that he did, but is most powerful in the generations of scholars, policy professionals, and journalists he inspired and mentored, who carry forward the wisdom he imparted.”

“Bob had an extraordinary ability to make the stakes of public opinion and health politics feel vivid and urgent, while also making his students feel capable of understanding and shaping those debates themselves,” she continued. “U.S. health policy remains deeply imperfect, but it’s better than it otherwise would have been because Bob engaged so deeply and taught students with an eye toward helping them understand how they could challenge and change the status quo.”

Blendon’s polls and policy writings spanned a variety of topics. In a 2023 article on a possible “public option” for health insurance, he and his colleagues wrote in the Milbank Quarterly, “The public option was a subject of intense interest during the legislative debate that gave rise to the Affordable Care Act; a review of 43 polls conducted between January 2009 and April 2010 found that public opinion at the time was responsive to question framing. While respondents were more likely to favor a public option if it was compared with Medicare, they were also more likely to favor the policy if the question used framing that was less adversarial to private health insurance.”

Shortly before the 2024 election, he discussed what implications the outcome could have for health policy. “Because Republicans have a lower level of confidence in health scientists, they are less likely to rely on scientists for decisions on health and medical policy issues,” he and his colleagues predicted in the New England Journal of Medicine. “This lack of confidence is also likely to lead Republicans to conduct government investigations of research agencies and university health science activities.”

“Bipartisan actions will include some level of effort to increase funding for Medicare and veterans’ medical care,” they continued. “But Republicans are likely to support efforts to encourage more Medicare beneficiaries to join private Medicare Advantage plans, and Democrats will support the existing Medicare program and its expansion. In terms of efforts to control healthcare costs, Democrats would entertain more proposals for regulation of prices by the federal government, whereas Republicans will have a number of proposals to encourage more competitive market forces without relying on increased government price regulation.”

“Bob Blendon was not a political scientist,” Drew Altman, PhD, president and CEO of KFF, wrote Wednesday in a post on X. “But at the HSPH he made healthcare politics a legitimate area of inquiry. In a system dominated by money, politics, and misinformation, a fundamental contribution.”