Post-Election (2016): Full ACA Repeal Still Not Heavily Supported

In what the Huffington Post's Jonathan Cohn refers to in his recent article as the "first major post-election survey on Obamacare," the monthly Kaiser Family Foundation poll (in the field November 15-21) has found support for "repeal[ing] the entire law" at 26% of the U.S. public. Veteran readers of the Health Care Polls blog will notice that this figure is consistent with the 20-30 percent range of support for full repeal that has existed for most of the six years the Affordable Care Act has been in existence. Further, according to the KFF report:

Among those who want to see the ACA repealed (26 percent of total population), 31 percent want to see the health care law just repealed and not replaced. Two-thirds want lawmakers to repeal the health care law and replace it with a Republican-sponsored alternative, including 42 percent who want lawmakers to wait to repeal until the details of a replacement plan have been figured out and 21 percent who want them to repeal the law immediately and figure out a replacement plan later.

Taking the 26% who want the law repealed and multiplying by the 31% (.31) of pro-repeal respondents who want no replacement, we get a grand total of 8% of respondents who want to go back to the pre-ACA health-care system.

Delving Deeper Into What Advocates of Repeal Prefer Specifically

Via Charles Gaba at ACAsignups.net, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports on a follow-up question in its latest poll that asks respondents advocating repeal of the Affordable Care Act what they specifically prefer (link). In an initial question about possible modifications to the law, 32 percent of respondents chose "repeal the entire law," among options that included "expand what the law does" (30% support), "move forward with implementing the law as it is" (14%), and "scale back what the law does" (11%). The rest said none of the above, don't know, etc.

The 32 percent who favored repeal of the ACA were asked a follow-up question that focused on preferences for Congress to "replace it with a Republican-sponsored alternative" or "not replace it"   (see Figure 4 on the above-linked page). Among the 32 percent favoring repeal on the original question, 37.5 percent (i.e., 12 percent of the full sample) favored replacement with a Republican alternative and an identical 37.5 percent (12 percent of full sample) favored no replacement. The latter amounts to going back to the pre-ACA health care system. The rest said none of these, don't know, etc.

Public Opinion Quarterly Article Reviews U.S. Attitude Trends On Government Role in Health-Insurance Coverage

The Spring 2016 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly features an article entitled "Support for Government Provision of Health Care and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" by Juliane Corman and David Levin (click here for abstract). As the title suggests, the authors embed their discussion of public opinion trends in support for the particular legislation embodied in the PPACA (also known simply as the ACA or "Obamacare") within Americans' opinions on the broader question of whether it is the role of government to see that everyone has health-insurance coverage.

The article is 66 pages long, divided roughly into 54 pages of tables, 7 pages of text, and 5 pages of references. The analyses focus on results in full national samples, as opposed to subgroups such as men and women. Given the huge amount of work done by the authors in compiling the tables and possible space limitations they faced, I can't fault them for not doing more. For anyone who is interested, I summarized age, gender, and regional differences in support for health care reform during 2009.

For anyone interested in public-opinion dynamics during the health care debates of the Obama years, I would say the Corman and Levin article is a must-read!