According to a new Kaiser Poll, a sizable majority of Americans oppose defunding the health care reform act commonly known as “Obamacare.” This means that despite with Rush, Sean, Mark and many conservatives insist, the vast majority of Americans do NOT want the law defunded — and it is yet another issue that puts conservatives out of sync with what the majority of Americans wants.
It suggests that GOPers will not be seen in a better light (understatement) if they shut down the government to defund it, or let the United States go into debt default — even if they try and set it up so that the Democrats have to vote against raising the debt ceiling in a bill with a poison pill about defunding.
The issue of nixing the law by defunding it via political games is, in effect, a ticking time-bomb. If the GOP wants to defund it without losing public support, they’ll have to repeal it — which would likely mean winning both houses of Congress and the Presidency.
The poll finds that the law is viewed negatively by a relatively small margin — but the margin isn’t small when it comes to defunding:
Public opinion on the ACA as a whole continues to tilt negative this month, with 37 percent saying they have a favorable view of the law and 42 percent expressing an unfavorable view, shares that have held relatively steady since February of this year.
Still, a majority of Americans (57 percent) say they disapprove of the idea of cutting off funding as a way to stop the law from being implemented, a finding that has been consistent in Kaiser Health Tracking Polls since January 2011. Republicans and those with an unfavorable view of the law overall are more likely to approve of attempts to defund the ACA, but even among these groups, about a third (34 percent and 33 percent, respectively) say they disapprove.
Why?
The most commonly chosen reason for opposition to defunding the ACA is that “using the budget process to stop a law is not the way our government should work,” (named as a major reason by 69 percent in this group), followed by a belief that “without funding the law will be crippled and won’t work as planned,” (56 percent) and feeling that the law will be “a good thing for the country” (49 percent). Fewer (35 percent) say their main reason for opposing defunding efforts is that they’ve “heard enough about the health care law and it’s time to move on to something else.”
And Kaiser offers this graph:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.