The debate is now 'about whether or not you believe you want to get everybody covered.' Obamacare brings Dems backlash

Most Americans don’t want to get rid of Obamacare. They just don’t share its fundamental goal of universal coverage anymore.

And not only did the political benefits that Democrats thought the 2010 law would eventually bring them not materialize, opposition has only grown, according to an analysis of multiple polls taken between 2010 and last month.


“There have been backlashes, but never like this,” said Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the analysis released Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

That backlash doesn’t appear directed at the mechanics of the law but at its underlying core principle.

Only 47 percent of Americans agree that it’s the government’s job to make sure everyone has health coverage, down from 69 percent in 2006, the analysis found. That shift is particularly pronounced among likely voters. Of those who are most likely to show up at the polls on Nov. 4, one in four believe in this principle.

The study includes a new poll of likely voters by the Harvard School of Public Health showing that while only 31 percent want to see Obamacare repealed, 23 percent want it scaled back. This coalition of Republicans and independents could represent a mandate for congressional efforts to diminish the sweeping overhaul four years after it was enacted — and with millions of people now covered under its provisions.

The debate is now “about whether or not you believe you want to get everybody covered,” Blendon said. “Something happened on the way to the forum here that made that a much more controversial value.”

The polling analysis is a snapshot of public opinion today and how it’s changed in recent years, so it does not capture the cause of the shift. But Blendon, citing a study from Kantar Media that found Obamacare’s opponents spent $418 million on 880,000 negative spots between the law’s enactment in 2010 and May of this year — outpacing spending by supporters 15 to 1, says the ad factor is hard to ignore.

“The scale of the negative advertising is of historic significance,” Blendon said. In the past, on issues like Medicare, the big campaigns came before the controversial votes in Congress. But after the law was enacted, “they just went away,” Blendon said. That hasn’t happened with the ACA.

Americans believed in the universal coverage principle by wide margins through most of the 2000s, according to the analysis, peaking in 2006. But by 2009, as the Obamacare debate intensified, only 47 percent said they believed it was government’s job, and that figure has hovered in place since then. Blendon speculated that ads criticizing the law’s impact on jobs and the middle class might have made people who supported universal coverage in principle decide the “side effects” aren’t worth it. Opinions about the law’s effects tend not to be driven by personal experience: 56 percent said the law hasn’t affected them directly.

Blendon and his co-author, John Benson, analyzed 27 polls from 14 different news organizations conducted between 2007 and this year. Harvard also conducted its own survey of 1,596 likely voters Sept. 10-28, in some cases adopting questions and likely voter measures from other national polls to ensure comparability.