Health Care or Groceries: Which Is Harder for Montanans to Afford? A Poll Asked Voters

A 2026 poll asked registered voters which everyday costs hit hardest, and nearly two-thirds of Montana voters ages 50 to 64 said they had trouble affording health care.

Groceries came in right behind.

Here’s how Montanans rated those costs, and what they can look like in your budget.

Note: This is general information, not medical or financial advice. Health care costs, grocery prices and coverage rules are subject to change.

Who Ran the Poll and How

The poll ran from Dec. 23, 2025, to Jan. 3, 2026, as part of Montana Insights, a project where Montana Free Press teams up with Rutgers University’s Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling.

Pollsters reached those voters through phone calls and text messages that linked to an online survey.

The outlet published the results during its 2026 poll week.

Results carry a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

Registered voters are residents signed up to vote, so if you aren’t registered, this poll didn’t include you.

If you’d been polled, you’d have rated how hard it is to afford costs such as health care, groceries and rent or mortgage payments.

Answer choices ran from “not at all” difficult to “very” difficult.

The 52% for health care includes anyone who said paying for it is at least somewhat hard, including the 23% who called it very difficult.

Pollsters weighted the results to reflect the state’s electorate.

Two more polls followed in 2026: a spring poll of 815 registered voters taken April 29 to May 7, and a summer poll taken Aug. 27 to Sept. 7.

Here are the findings, starting with health care and moving to groceries.

Health Care Costs

If you’re covered through your job, you pay a share of the premium.

KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, publishes state data on employer-based plans showing Montana workers with family coverage paid an average of $4,967 a year in 2025.

Employers covered the other $17,022, about 77% of a $21,989 average family premium that sits below the $26,281 national average.

Spread over a year, that full premium comes to about $1,832 a month.

For single coverage, the same KFF data show Montana workers paid an average of $1,493 a year, or about $124 a month, compared with $1,817 nationally.

Moving from single to family coverage multiplies a Montana worker’s average share by roughly 3.3.

Your family-plan share works out to about $414 a month, before a single copay or deductible.

Montana’s median household income is $72,509 in 2024 dollars, so that share equals roughly 7% of it, though the comparison is rough because households get insurance in different ways.

The Census Bureau lists 11.0% of Montanans under 65 as uninsured.

Federal rules generally cap out-of-pocket costs for covered care at $10,600 for one person and $21,200 for a family in 2026.

Once you reach Medicare, costs change but don’t disappear.

The 2026 Part A hospital deductible is $1,736, and the Part B deductible is $283.

Grocery Costs

What would a month of groceries cost you?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Thrifty Food Plan, the cheapest of its four food plans, priced it at $1,024.00 for a family of four in September 2026.

The department’s reference family is two adults and two school-age children.

That estimate rests on prices in the contiguous 48 states and Washington, D.C., so it isn’t a Montana figure.

Over 12 months, it comes to about $12,300, or about $236 a week, which works out to roughly $59 a week per person.

That’s about $34 a day for the whole family.

Pricier plans cost more, since the department produces four food plans at successively higher cost levels.

For scale, that national plan costs roughly two and a half times what the average Montana worker with an employer-based family plan pays toward premiums.

Set against Montana’s median household income, it comes to roughly 17%, though a national plan and a state income aren’t a perfect match.

Food bought at stores took 4.8% of U.S. disposable income in 2025, down from 6.1% in 1997, according to the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service.

In the poll, 48% of voters reported at least some difficulty affording groceries and other food costs, versus 52% for health care.

Your total depends on how many people you feed and where you shop.

Age Gaps in Affordability

The poll’s age breakdown shows who is feeling the strain.

Nearly two-thirds of voters ages 50 to 64 reported difficulty affording health care, and 34% of that group called it very difficult.

That’s higher than the 23% of all voters who called health care very difficult.

If you’re in that age group, those numbers describe people like you.

Age groups are smaller slices of the 801 voters, so their margins of error are larger than the poll’s overall 4.1 points.