Poll: Americans Trust Democrats More Than GOP On Health Care As 2020 Approaches

Protesters chant as Republican and Democratic House members walk down the steps of the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 4, 2017, after the Republican health care bill passed in the House. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans are giving Democrats a clear edge on health care as the 2020 presidential race gears up, according to a new poll that also finds many Republicans backing one of their competitors’ top ideas: a government insurance plan people can buy into.

But support for the plan that has attracted the most attention, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All,” is concentrated mostly among Democrats.

Overall, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds that Democrats enjoy a 17 percentage point advantage over Republicans in Americans’ assessments of whom they trust more to handle health care, 40% to 23%. That compares with a public more evenly divided over which party would better handle several other major areas of national policy, including the economy, immigration and foreign affairs.

“As I look at what’s going on, there is no question that Democrats are far more structured toward trying to make sure people have health care,” said Robert Head, of Lewes, Delaware.

Head, who’s retired from a marketing career for machinery manufacturers, said he was a lifelong Republican who lost faith in the party because of the Iraq War.
“I tend to think that health care is a fundamental human right,” he added. “The Republicans don’t have a plan. All they want to do is block grants back to the states.”

A public backlash against the GOP’s fruitless efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act helped Democrats win the House in 2018 . Now, Democrats are looking to health care to help them take the White House in 2020. All the Democratic candidates are looking to expand government-sponsored coverage.

The survey shows that Americans are generally in sync with the idea of government taking a leading role. Fifty-seven percent believe the federal government is responsible for making sure all Americans have health care coverage, while 41% think it is not.

Many Americans are open to the two approaches being pushed by Democrats, according to the poll.

The first is Medicare for All, under which all U.S. residents would be covered through a single government plan financed with new taxes. The second is an option for people to buy into a new government plan as an alternative to private insurance. Key details of both concepts have yet to be spelled out.

Among all Americans, 42% support a single-payer plan like the one espoused by Sanders, while 31% express opposition. Another quarter say they are neither in favor nor opposed. Support breaks down along partisan and ideological lines, with liberal Democrats about four times as likely as conservative Republicans to back single-payer.

Christine Knapp, a Republican from Fresno, California, is concerned that Sanders’ approach might affect her current Medicare coverage.

“People who are Medicare recipients right now, we’ve paid into it,” she said. “If you start putting everybody into it, I don’t know where the money is going to come from. It’s an interesting idea, but it could be fraught with a lot of negativity.”

The partisan gap narrows significantly, however, for the option of Americans buying into a government program.

Overall, 53% support the buy-in option, with 17% opposed and 29% on the fence.
Similar shares of Democrats back the two plans. But Republicans are nearly twice as likely to support a public option plan as a single-payer plan, 44% to 22%.

Knapp likes the buy-in because it calls for some level of personal responsibility from those who would benefit.

“It’s not just going to some county health department and signing the paperwork and getting free health care for life,” said Knapp, who worked as a civilian employee for local law enforcement agencies.

In Columbia, South Carolina, small business owner Tanya Attarwala is a Democrat who says she could get behind either Medicare for All or a buy-in approach.

Right now Attarwala is uninsured and is paying out of pocket for her health care at a local Walmart clinic. She said that she was covered previously under former President Barack Obama’s health law but that premiums were too costly when compared with the medical services she received each year.

“The idea should be to cover everybody, there should be nobody without health care,” she said. “They should not be fighting about this. You have to see which one will work best.”

Attarwala’s “all of the above” attitude mirrors what’s happening among the Democratic presidential candidates, some of whom have signed up to different health care plans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who formally announced his candidacy on Thursday , has said he believes health care is a right but has not laid out a detailed proposal of his own. Biden generally favors building on the ACA, often called “Obamacare,” which he worked to pass under Obama.

A barometer of the nation’s health care debate, Obama’s law receives support from 48% of Americans, while 30% are opposed. Roughly 2 in 10 neither support nor oppose the ACA.

The 2010 law extended coverage to more than 20 million people and made it illegal for insurers to turn away those with health problems. But it came with a host of rollout problems and led to prohibitively high premiums for many consumers who buy individual policies and make too much money to qualify for federal financial assistance.

Nonetheless the poll flashes a warning sign for President Donald Trump, who’s thrown his support to a lawsuit seeking to overturn “Obamacare” in its entirety. It finds that 57% of Americans oppose repealing the ACA, though many would like to see it changed.
___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,108 adults was conducted April 11-14 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.
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Online:
AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/

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Notable Replies

  1. But for some single-issue voters,
    healthcare is not their priority.

  2. Avatar for outis outis says:

    There is also the problem of “I want government to make my healtcare better, but I don’t want it to provide it to THOSE people,” whoever that might be.

  3. That’s great but health care by itself is not going to defeat a criminal POTUS who, if we don’t impeach him, can say that he fought the law and won. He will then run a revanchist and racist campaign to seek retribution against all who defy him. Backed by a good economy and a morally muddled Democratic opposition, Indies will split and he will win.

    Looking at the CPS election results, while health care was clearly a significant issue in a number of races, I don’t think it was, by itself, the reason why the Dems beat the GOP by 8 points nationally in 2018. The Dems got a bunch of younger voters and POC voters out to the polls to build that margin. I can’t see how health care would be a #1 issue for young people. All young people feel indestructible. It’s not existential to them. It’s a nice to have. For POC, accountability and the existential threat posed by Jeff Sessions’ DOJ were equally strong motivators as health care. For a lot of women voters, the #trumprussia scandal and how it deprived HRC of the job she justly earned and Trump unjustly stole was a motivator. Basically, we rode an anti-Trump wave and held the GOP accountable for not checking Trump, and held Trump accountable for not checking the GOP.

    I think Nancy Pelosi has given herself too much credit for that victory and the messaging behind it. She did a great job obviously, but for her to continue to posit that checking Trump interferes with her agenda as opposed to being an integral part of the reason we made her Speaker again demonstrates a lack of understanding.

  4. The GOP has released their 2020 slogan to reverse this disturbing trend:

    “We’ll Let You Keep The Private Health Insurance Plan You Don’t Already Have!”

  5. Avatar for outis outis says:

    What will he say if we do impeach him and the senate doesn’t vote to remove him? (I think that this whole debate chiefly comes down to a disagreement on the assumption of the PR value of impeachment with no real tangible outcome beyond itself. And let me fully admit that I don’t know the answer that I think is really right in this instance, although I am reasonably convinced that I know what is actually going to happen, or not happen no matter what I get myself all worked up about.)

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