Public trust in the press and government institutions is at an all time low. But faith in our physicians is at an all-time high. The number of Americans who rank their doctors as “high” or “very high” on honesty and ethics has increased by 18 percent over the past two decades, now standing at 70 percent. National Journal’s Margot Sanger-Katz explores why:

Your doctor is the person who sits in a room with you and helps to solve your problems. If you ask people how they feel about the medical system, they grade it much lower than they do physicians. “Trust in doctors is very much interpersonal trust,” says Mark Hall, a professor of law and public health at Wake Forest University, who has studied the dimensions of the doctor-patient relationship.

The structure of medicine may also account for some of the lingering trust. The insurance system places an intermediary between care and payment, which makes it harder for patients to see doctors as profiteers. (Doctors who have their own imaging equipment have been shown to order more MRIs, for instance, but patients don’t necessarily associate their physicians with the bills or realize that the additional procedures may be unwarranted.) “They believe the goal of the physician is for you to do better with your hypertension. It isn’t to make a million dollars in selling hypertension medicine,” says Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who studies public attitudes.

More from Sanger-Katz here.