A striking finding of the latest Breitbart News/Gravis poll is that only 36 percent of respondents call the Affordable Care Act a “success.”

More than half of respondents say ObamaCare is not a success, while 10 percent said they didn’t know enough to judge the program’s performance.

This poll arrives at a bleak hour for ObamaCare, which was described by even former President Bill Clinton as “the craziest thing in the world” because “people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.”

The mainstream media has grown noticeably weary of defending ObamaCare (and of repeating Democrat spin about what Bill Clinton “really meant” by his negative remarks.) The Chicago Tribune pronounced last rites in September with an editorial entitled “Why ObamaCare Failed,” decrying the “staggering price hikes” and “drastically fewer choices of plans” awaiting Illinois customers in the next enrollment period.

Minnesota is even further down the road to misery than Illinois, with Bloomberg News warning that its individual market is on “the brink of collapse” as premiums soar by 50 to 67 percent. The state commerce commissioner, Mike Rothman — an appointee of Democrat Governor Mark Dayton — conceded that even these stunning rate hikes were merely a “stopgap for 2017” to avert disaster.

Big insurers like Blue Cross/Blue Shield are pulling out of the state exchanges after heavy financial losses, while others plan to limit enrollment, creating what state Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt accurately described as “a health care crisis for thousands of Minnesota families.”

Tennessee’s insurance commissioner Julie Mix McPeak said her state system was also “very near collapse” in August, for much the same reason as Minnesota’s calamity: soaring premiums combined with insurers bailing out of the market. Over 650 counties across the nation are down to a single ObamaCare insurance provider.

Speaking of emergency stopgap measures, we learned in recent days that ObamaCare would have collapsed already, if the administration wasn’t breaking the law by pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of ailing insurance companies. ObamaCare’s federal mandarins were legally barred from bailing out their partners in the insurance industry, but they did it anyway.

Even the New York Times admitted the “ailing Obama health care act may have to change to survive,” which is another way of saying it’s a failure in its current form… and it can only be saved by the Republicans who refused to vote for the Affordable Care Act while accurately predicting its failure.

ObamaCare’s dwindling band of defenders routinely confuse Medicaid enrollment with ObamaCare enrollment, and ignore the huge number of Americans who lost perfectly decent plans despite President Obama’s false promises, to produce wildly inflated numbers of people who supposedly gained health insurance due to the Affordable Care Act.

Not only is this a fraudulent justification for the program — no hard-working American should suffer unfairly to sustain a broken scheme that managed to insure a few people, at outrageous cost — but Medicaid was not in good shape to begin with, and it’s getting worse. Democrats are trying very hard to avoid discussion of the ObamaCare disaster today. They’ll be trying not to talk about the ObamaCare-inflicted Medicaid disaster tomorrow.

“The federal government’s 100% financing of state spending on expansion enrollees has led states to boost enrollment and create high payment rates,” Brian Blase of the Mercatus Center reported at Forbes last month.

“In states that have expanded, enrollment and per enrollee spending are nearly 50% higher than predicted. While interest groups within the states – particularly hospitals and insurers – benefit from the higher spending being charged to federal taxpayers, substantial evidence suggests much of this new spending is wasted or provides little value for its intended recipients,” the Mercatus study revealed.

Blase further observed that beneficiaries “obtain low value” through the Medicaid expansion, while the amount lost to waste, fraud, and abuse is increasing, as improper spending “exploded” from $26 billion to $67 billion between 2013 and 2016.

In a sense, Democrats can point to the 36% approval number in the new Breitbart/Gravis poll as a political success, because the number of people willing to describe ObamaCare as a success is considerably higher than the number who have actually been helped by the program.

Frankly, the only reason the Affordable Care Act can squeeze a thumbs-up from a third of the populace is that the employer-provided insurance market is working far better than the individual marketplace… and that’s the part of the insurance system people were largely content with, before hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into ObamaCare. Hard-working Americans should not be made to suffer any longer so that Democrats can enjoy a little political success.