Backing for the landmark law dropped by 7 percentage points in August, a new poll finds. Public sours on health care reform

A new poll shows that public support for health care reform dropped sharply in August — a dagger in Democrats’ hopes that their landmark legislation will help them in November’s midterm.

The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll has support for the bill dropping 7 percentage points in August — down to 43 percent — while opposition rose 10 points to 45 percent. That’s the weakest showing since May — and a far cry from the bump proponents had hoped to see as some of the law’s more consumer-friendly provisions kick in.


Democrats said throughout the year-long debate on Capitol Hill that support for the overhaul would increase once the bill passed and Americans were able to take advantage of some of its benefits. But it appears voters’ opinions of the legislation were set more firmly than anyone thought during the bruising political fight.

“Public opinion on health reform has been stuck in a fairly narrow band and is not changing dramatically,” said Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “And with concerns about the economy and jobs dominating the public’s agenda, and local issues always so important in midterm elections, it is not clear that health reform will play a significant role at the polls in November.”

Respondents listed health care as the third most important factor in deciding how they’ll vote this fall — behind the economy and “dissatisfaction with government.”

Forty-two percent of respondents said health care reform will play an “extremely important” role in their ballot-box decisions, on par with the 41 percent who said the same thing in June.

About one-third of voters said support for the health reform law would make it more likely that they’d vote for a candidate. But one-third said it would make it less likely and another third said it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Those figures haven’t changed much since the law passed.

A series of insurance industry reforms, which Democrats pointed to as some of the most consumer-friendly provisions of the law, are due to go into effect next month. They include a ban on lifetime or annual caps on insurance coverage and free preventive care on new insurance plans.

While many of these provisions have proved popular in polls, the popularity of the overhaul on the whole hasn’t improved. Plus, opposition to other provisions — namely, the requirement that nearly all Americans buy insurance coverage — has increased. The so-called “individual mandate” was opposed by 70 percent of the Kaiser poll’s respondents.