Obamacare debuted to mixed-to-negative reviews last October 1, with less than 40 percent of Americans signaling their approval in the run-up to the rollout.
One year later, after critics assailed an unusable website and the president’s “broken promises,” and supporters clung to a redemption narrative around an enrollment surge near a spring deadline, and critics hammered incumbent Democrats for supporting the law, and supporters countered with the two-word phrase “it’s working” … after a 40-shot tennis rally that’d make even Rafael Nadal collapse, the numbers have hardly budged.
According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls between Sept. 1 and 29 of last year, 39 percent of Americans approved of the healthcare law, and 52 percent disapproved.
According to a year-over-year average, those numbers now stand at 41 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove.
An abundance of polling data in the month before the law was implemented last year — including a cluster of polls in the early and middle parts of September — showed a consistent, albeit slim, majority of respondents opposing the law, and far fewer supporting it. All data via RCP:
Though polling is less plentiful a year later, the clusters of data are largely similar.
Overlapped, the data show that individual polls deviate from the average slightly less — and the average is mostly the same.
Republicans have pounced on the Obamacare one-year anniversary to take note of the lack of change.
“ObamaCare is as unpopular as ever,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Wednesday. “This law is still hurting our nation as it has increased the cost of healthcare and limited options for doctors.”
And the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the GOP’s campaign arm working to usher in a Senate majority this fall, released a video dinging vulnerable Democratic incumbents for parroting claims about the capacity of consumers to retain their health plans and doctors under the law.
The obstacle facing Republican criticism of the law, however, continues to be Obamacare’s entrenchment, which helped impel Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to lead the ill-fated “defund Obamacare” charge last year. A healthy majority of people who have purchased healthcare plans through a government exchange are pleased with the coverage, and despite the law’s unfavorable marks, individuals would rather see Congress “work to improve the law” rather than repeal it outright by a 63 percent to 33 percent margin, per recent numbers from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
