Public support for President Obama’s health care overhaul has hit an all-time low. And most troubling for the White House, just one in two Democrats now supports Obama’s signature achievement, leaving the president to defend a law that Republicans dismiss as government overreach and liberals complain does not go far enough.
According to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, just 34 percent favor Obama’s health care reform while 51 percent have an unfavorable view of the legislation for which Obama expended much of his political capital — and which has fostered only gridlock on Capitol Hill.
As Republicans continue to clamor for repeal of the law, the initiative’s downward spiral bodes poorly for a White House with scant positive news on the domestic front as Election Day approaches.
The primary reason for the drop in overall public support for the reforms, Kaiser found, was the waning support among liberals — just half of Democrats approve of the health care law, down from roughly two-thirds who approved just last month.
Some progressives say Obama’s health care law leaves too many people uninsured and does little to lessen pharmaceutical industry influence that critics say drives up medical costs. There were also setbacks for the reforms themselves.
The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, or CLASS Act, was to provide long-term care insurance for aging workers and would have been financed through workers’ voluntary contributions. After 19 months of trying to implement the program, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced she was dropping the program because there was no way to make it work financially.
And despite Obama’s insistence that the cost of health care premiums would decrease under his watch, family premiums increased by 9 percent this year, Kaiser found.
Voters are more than twice as likely this month to say the law won’t significantly affect them or their families as they are to say they’ll be better off under the law. Less than one in five surveyed said their families would be better off under the law.
The plummeting public perception carries political ramifications for Democratic lawmakers who have grown wary of being linked too closely to a president whose approval ratings are hovering around 40 percent.
Obama’s campaign has been trying to neutralize the issue by linking his health care reforms with those imposed in Massachusetts by then-Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate the White House is betting will win the nomination and face Obama next fall. Yet, the Kaiser poll found that those arguments haven’t caught on with the American public.
Nearly 75 percent of the public — and seven in 10 GOP primary voters — said they didn’t know enough about Romney’s plan to have an opinion on it. Roughly the same number were unaware that the Massachusetts health care plan is similar to the one pushed by Obama and congressional Democrats.
Obama’s contested health care overhaul also is likely to become a larger political target because of a renewed debate about the nation’s exploding debt.
Analysts argue that any serious plan to bring down the deficit must address mounting health care costs, which will account for a fifth of the nation’s gross domestic product by the end of the decade, according to federal auditors.
