Republican attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act are in a holding pattern at the moment as the Trump White House and House GOP leaders search for votes to pass some sort of proposal.
New polling from the Washington Post and ABC News suggests that no matter what they come up with, they’ve already likely lost the messaging fight over health care.
Just more than one in three respondents (37%) said they prefer that Republicans repeal and replace the ACA. By contrast, 61% would rather see Congress keep the law and work to improve it.
Democrats, as you might expect, are nearly unanimous (88%) in favor of keeping and improving Obamacare. Far more surprising to me is that one in five self-identified Republicans (21%) prefer keeping and improving the law as opposed to repealing and replacing it. Independents clearly favor the keep/improve option; two thirds say they prefer that to repealing and replacing it.
What’s clear from those numbers is that Republicans are in a deep hole in selling their Obamacare alternative to the public before there’s even been a single actual vote on the proposal.
This is the great challenge of trying to do something that is both very complex from a legislative perspective and that touches every Americans’ life. People may not love what they currently have but they know they don’t want any changes. It’s the classic devil-you-know-versus-devil-you-don’t situation.
From the moment the Affordable Care Act was introduced in Congress, a majority of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it. The law’s unpopularity and the uncertainties around its implementation played a major role in widespread Democratic losses in the House and Senate in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections.
But, now, it’s the law of the land and people are getting used to it. Changing it again isn’t something people are keen on — including people who didn’t want Obamacare in the first place!
That’s the problem President Trump, Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell must now face. Not only do they not have a piece of legislation that a majority of their majority support — and, make no mistake, we’d have a vote on it this week if they did — but they also are dealing with a public who simply isn’t clamoring for a radical overhaul of the ACA.
Further complicating their calculations is the fact that for a strain of the GOP base, there can be no compromise on health care. Only full repeal of Obamacare is acceptable. Anything else will be categorized as capitulation.
Those complexities explain why, less than 100 days into Trump’s presidency, we have already seen a series of starts and stops on health care. The policy is difficult. The politics are even harder. And Republicans are already losing their grip on both.
