The Weekly Standard
A new Rasmussen poll shows that 54 percent of Americans want Obamacare to be repealed, with the vast majority of those 54 percent “strongly” supporting repeal. In fact, according to Rasmussen, it’s easier to find an American who strongly supports repeal (44 percent of voters) than to find one who even “somewhat” opposes it (42 percent). Even worse for Democrats, a whopping 59 percent of independents want to see Obamacare be repealed.
The Republicans have a winning platform to run on with “Repeal, and then real reform,” but they need to offer voters a vision of what real reform would look like. For Republican congressional candidates looking for a sensible and understandable reform proposal to complement their commonsensical push for repeal, the 1-page small-bill proposal (www.smallbill.org) could be the ticket.
The Democrats had optimistically claimed that turning a deaf ear to the American people and passing their unpopular bill would make it popular. But Scott Rasmussen observes that “the overriding tone of the data is that passage of the legislation has not changed anything. Those who opposed it before now want to repeal it. Those who supported the legislation oppose repealing it.” Unfortunately for the Democrats, the former number is a lot bigger than the latter one.
Rasmussen’s findings comes on the heels of a USA Today/Gallup poll released a couple of days ago. That poll showed that, under Obamacare, Americans believe that the quality of their own health care would decline, the overall quality of health care in the United States would decline, their own health costs would rise, overall U.S. health costs would rise, deficits would rise, and the economy would suffer. And Americans don’t hold any of these opinions by slim margins. For each of these six questions, Americans think that things would get worse, rather than better, by a margin of at least 10 percentage points, and the average margin for the six questions is 21 percentage points.