Seventy percent said they supported providing “Medicare for all,” also known as single-payer health care, for Americans, according to a new American Barometer survey.
The poll, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company, found that 42 percent of respondents said they “strongly” supported the proposal, while 28 percent said they “somewhat” supported it.
Fifteen percent said they “somewhat” opposed the measure, while another 15 percent said they “strongly” opposed it.
The results mirrored a Reuters-Ipsos poll released in August, which also found that 70 percent of Americans supported “Medicare for all.”
The poll comes as an increasing number of Democrats have touted the proposal as health care becomes a major campaign issue ahead of the midterm elections.
“‘Medicare for all’ is a way for Democrats to say basically, ‘Hey, we understand that this is an issue, and we’re willing to do something about it,'” Democratic pollster Nancy Zdunkewicz told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
“This specter of government takeover of health care, I don’t even hear it in focus groups with white, working-class Trump voters. They’ll say things like ‘I really like Medicare, why can’t we all have something like that?'” she continued.
The option has also been favored by potential 2020 presidential hopefuls, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who sponsored “Medicare for all” legislation.
Sanders’s plan has the goal of ultimately providing Medicare for everyone in the U.S., meaning no one would be uninsured.
President Trump and Republicans, in turn, have ramped up their attacks on Democrats for supporting the option
Trump penned a USA Today op-ed earlier this month, saying the option would pan out to be “Medicare for None.”
Sanders fired back at the president in another op-ed, saying Trump was “grossly distorting what the Medicare for All legislation does.”
The American Barometer was conducted Oct. 19-20 among 1,000 registered voters. The sampling margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
— Julia Manchester
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