Nine years later, Americans evenly split on ObamaCare: Gallup

Americans are nearly evenly split on their views of the Affordable Care Act, according to a poll released nine years after the passage of one of former President Obama’s signature achievements.

Fifty percent of respondents in the Gallup poll out Wednesday said they approve of the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as ObamaCare, compared to 48 percent who disapprove of the health care law.

Gallup noted that public opinion of the landmark law has shifted in three general phases since it went into effect.

From 2013 to 2016, as the law first went into effect and suffered a rocky rollout, a majority of Americans disapproved of the legislation.

Then, as Republicans attempted to repeal the law under President Trump in 2017, more Americans said they approved of the legislation for the first time in its history.

And since November of 2018, a third phase in which Americans have been evenly divided on ObamaCare has been discovered, according to Gallup.

Pollsters found deep partisan divisions, with 84 percent of Democrats surveyed now approving of ObamaCare, compared to just 11 percent of Republicans. Eighty-seven percent of Republican respondents disapprove of it, as do 15 percent of Democrats.

Americans with a long-term illness or disease that health insurance companies deem a “preexisting condition” are more likely to approve of the Affordable Care Act than those who don’t suffer from such a condition, by a margin of 55 percent to 49 percent.

The Gallup survey was conducted by telephone and interviewed a random sample of 1,015 adults from Nov. 1-14. The margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points.