Karlyn Bowman
Samantha Goldstein
March 22, 2022 - AEI
In a Breitbart News interview recently, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said that if the Republicans win control of the White House, the Senate, and the House in 2024, the party should be ready with a clear agenda. “For example,” he said, “if we’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare . . . we need to have the plan ahead of time so that once we get in office, we can implement it immediately, not knock around like we did last time and fail.” Johnson himself faces a tough reelection contest this year, and his hypothetical suggestion will provide campaign fodder for his Democratic rivals this fall. Looking at the polls, too, it isn’t clear that trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, again would be a smart political move.
How popular is the law? We haven’t had any new polls on Obamacare in a while. For more than two years, the pollsters have been tracking attitudes about the COVID pandemic. At least in part because of the extensive COVID polling coverage, attention to other subjects such as Obamacare diminished.
For years after the Act’s passage in 2010, the Kaiser Family Foundation asked people about it monthly. Gallup started asking people about the law in 2012. From April 2017 to October 2021 in Kaiser’s polls, more Americans have had a “generally favorable” opinion than a “generally unfavorable” one as the chart below shows. During Trump’s presidency, favorable opinions outweighed unfavorable ones. During much of the Obama presidency, unfavorable views were usually stronger than favorable ones. In Kaiser’s latest question from October 2021, responses were 58 percent generally favorable, 41 percent generally unfavorable.
Gallup’s question asks people whether they generally approve or disapprove of “the 2010 Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama that restructured the US health care system.” In their latest poll from November 2021, people split evenly, 48 to 48 percent. Although the most recent results from these two pollsters differ, the overall pattern in Gallup’s trend is similar to Kaiser’s: Opposition was generally slightly greater than support during the Obama years, and support for the law was greater in the Trump years. The similar patterns in both polls confirm our view that the public often wants to check the actions of the party in power by preventing it from going too far in one direction or the other.
In most polls, improving the health care system is always a high public priority. However, that doesn’t mean repealing a law that has been on the books for more than a decade is a priority or that it would be popular.