AP-GfK Poll: Most see health law being implemented

WASHINGTON (AP) — They may not like it, but they don’t see it going away. About 7 in 10 Amer­i­cans think Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s health care law will go fully into effect with some changes, rang­ing from minor to major alter­ations, an Asso­ci­ated Press-GfK poll finds.

Just 12 per­cent say they expect the Afford­able Care Act — “Oba­macare” to dis­mis­sive oppo­nents — to be repealed completely.

The law — cov­er­ing 30 mil­lion unin­sured, requir­ing vir­tu­ally every legal U.S. res­i­dent to carry health insur­ance and for­bid­ding insur­ers from turn­ing away the sick — remains as divi­sive as the day it passed more than two years ago. After sur­viv­ing a Supreme Court chal­lenge in June, its fate will prob­a­bly be set­tled by the Novem­ber elec­tion, with Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney vow­ing to begin repeal­ing it on Day One and Obama pledg­ing to dili­gently carry it out.

That’s what the can­di­dates say. But the poll found Amer­i­cans are con­verg­ing on the idea that the over­haul will be part of their lives in some form, although prob­a­bly not down to its last clause and comma.

Forty-one per­cent said they expect it to be fully imple­mented with minor changes, while 31 per­cent said they expect to see it take effect with major changes. Only 11 per­cent said they think it will be imple­mented as passed.

Amer­i­cans also pre­fer that states have a strong say in car­ry­ing out the over­haul. The poll found that 63 per­cent want states to run new health insur­ance mar­kets called “exchanges.” They would open for busi­ness in 2014, sign­ing up indi­vid­u­als and small busi­nesses for taxpayer-subsidized pri­vate cov­er­age. With many GOP gov­er­nors still on the side­lines, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment may wind up oper­at­ing the exchanges in half or more of the states, an out­come only 32 per­cent of Amer­i­cans want to see, accord­ing to the poll.

The poll, devel­oped with researchers from Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, also found an endur­ing gen­er­a­tion gap, with peo­ple 65 and older most likely to oppose the bill and those younger than 45 less likely to be against it.

“Peo­ple are sort of aver­ag­ing out the can­di­dates’ posi­tions,” said Har­vard School of Pub­lic Health pro­fes­sor Robert Blendon, who tracks polling on health care issues. “The pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates are say­ing there’s a stark choice, but when you ask the vot­ers, they don’t believe that the whole bill will be repealed or imple­mented as it is today in law.”

Repub­li­cans remain over­whelm­ingly opposed to the over­haul and in favor of repeal. But only 21 per­cent said they think that will actu­ally come about.

Rom­ney sup­porter Toni Gard­ner, 69, a retired school sys­tem nurse from Louisville, Ky., said that until a few weeks ago she was sure her can­di­date fully sup­ported repeal, as she does.

But then Rom­ney said in an inter­view there are a num­ber of things he likes in the law that he would put into prac­tice, includ­ing mak­ing sure that peo­ple with pre-existing med­ical prob­lems can get cov­er­age. The Rom­ney cam­paign quickly qual­i­fied that, but the candidate’s state­ment still resonates.

“If Rom­ney gets in, he’ll go with parts of it,” Gard­ner said, “and there are parts of that he won’t go with.”

Gard­ner thinks expand­ing cov­er­age will cost too much and may make it harder to get an appoint­ment with a doc­tor. Besides, she doesn’t believe the gov­ern­ment can han­dle the job. She’s cov­ered by Medicare — a government-run health sys­tem — but says “that wasn’t a choice that I had.”

At 26, Santa Mon­ica, Calif., web devel­oper Vyki Englert has only bare-bones health insur­ance cov­er­age. Her par­ents, a preschool teacher and a self-employed pho­tog­ra­pher, are unin­sured. Englert says she thinks the law will largely go into effect as passed. (Among 18– to 29-year-olds, 60 per­cent think it will be imple­mented with only minor changes or none at all.)

Englert says that she sup­ports guar­an­tee­ing cov­er­age to peo­ple with health prob­lems and that pro­vi­sions such as broader cov­er­age for birth con­trol will help younger women such as her.

“I kind of see a day-to-day way where this law could ben­e­fit me,” she said. Englert says the health care law dove­tails with a trend toward con­sumerism in her gen­er­a­tion. Older Amer­i­cans “don’t have the con­text of the young peo­ple,” she added. “They are look­ing more at the the­o­ret­i­cal impact on the bud­get and the country.”

Over­all, the poll found Amer­i­cans divided on the ques­tion of repeal, with nei­ther side able to claim a major­ity. Forty-nine per­cent said the health care law should be repealed com­pletely, while 44 per­cent said it should be imple­mented as written.

The notion that the law will be imple­mented with changes, cap­tured in the poll, mir­rors a dis­cus­sion going on behind the scenes in Wash­ing­ton, par­tic­u­larly among some Republicans.

“Who­ever wins the elec­tion, the (health care law) is going to be mod­i­fied,” Mark McClel­lan, who ran Medicare under for­mer Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, said in a recent interview.

Con­gres­sional Repub­li­cans say if tax increases are on the table in a bud­get nego­ti­a­tion with a re-elected Obama next year, changes to the health care law — includ­ing pos­si­ble delays in imple­men­ta­tion — also must be con­sid­ered. For now, White House offi­cials refuse to be drawn in on that question.

Some parts of the law already are in effect; its big cov­er­age expan­sion for the unin­sured doesn’t come until 2014.

Pub­lic opin­ion about the law itself has barely budged since the sum­mer of 2010, soon after it passed. At the time, 30 per­cent sup­ported the law. It’s now 32 per­cent. And 40 per­cent opposed the over­haul. That’s now 36 percent.

And mis­con­cep­tions about the law that reigned two years ago con­tinue to live on, includ­ing for­mer Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s widely debunked charge that it would cre­ate “death pan­els” to decide on care for the elderly and dis­abled. In 2010, 39 per­cent believed the law would set up com­mit­tees to review indi­vid­ual med­ical records and decide who gets care paid for by the gov­ern­ment. Forty-one per­cent cur­rently hold that view, accord­ing to the poll.

The poll asked peo­ple to say whether 18 dif­fer­ent items were in the law or not and to rate how cer­tain they were about their answers. Just 14 per­cent were right most of the time and sure of it.

Still, knowl­edge about what the law actu­ally does is grow­ing. More peo­ple are aware of pro­vi­sions that allow adult chil­dren to stay on their par­ents’ cov­er­age until age 26, impose insur­ance man­dates on indi­vid­u­als and busi­nesses, and pro­tect those with pre-existing med­ical conditions.

The poll was con­ducted Aug. 3–13 and involved inter­views with 1,334 ran­domly cho­sen adults nation­wide. It has a mar­gin of sam­pling error of plus or minus 3.4 per­cent­age points.

The sur­vey was con­ducted online by GfK using its Knowl­edgePanel sam­ple, which first chose peo­ple for the study using ran­domly gen­er­ated tele­phone num­bers and home addresses. Once peo­ple were selected to par­tic­i­pate, they were inter­viewed online. Par­tic­i­pants with­out Inter­net access were pro­vided it for free.

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Sep 26 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.