A national survey conducted entirely after House passage of the Republican health care bill found that support and opposition to Obamacare is split evenly among Americans.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll, taken on Saturday, showed 45 percent of respondents in favor of the law and 44 percent against. That result remains roughly unchanged from March, when a similar tally revealed a 44/43 split of approval and disapproval. Since then, support of the GOP bill, the American Health Care Act, has increased from the low 20s to 31 percent, driven entirely by Trump voters coalescing around the plan.
President Trump and congressional Republicans—and, by extension, the AHCA—have been credited with improving the Affordable Care Act’s popularity, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and Vox’s Ezra Klein have written in recent weeks. Multiple polls have showed Obamacare surging into strong net favorability among the public: Gallup and the Democratically aligned firm PPP had the law at +14 and +16 at different points in April, respectively. But a CNN survey recorded after both of those found Obamacare with a spread of -1 percentage points. The polls from this year have been done sporadically. But the legislative process has been fluid, and the GOP legislation has been amended significantly and often abruptly.
One question that has seemed relatively consistent across polling firms: If Congress should repeal the law in its entirety, repeal portions of it, or keep it all. Even the Gallup survey showed that a plurality of Americans wanted to strike the middle ground, while smaller but roughly equal numbers wanted full repeal and full preservation.
Undoubtedly related: It’s long been known that two aspects of Obamacare—the ability of families to keep children on their insurance up to age 26 and the law’s pre-existing conditions provisions—are widely popular with the public. The AHCA rejiggered how the health care system would treat the latter issue, which created concern among wary Republican House members and sharp criticism among Americans opposed to the bill.
