Health Care Law

58% Favor Repeal of Health Care Law, But Confidence in Repeal Is Down

Monday, January 31, 2011

Most voters continue to favor repeal of the national health care law, but now that the Republican-run House has voted to repeal and sent it on to the Democratic-controlled Senate for action, confidence that the law ultimately will be repealed has fallen to its lowest level in four months.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 58% of Likely Voters at least somewhat favor repeal of the health care law, including 47% who Strongly Favor repeal.  Thirty-eight percent (38%) oppose repeal, with 29% who are Strongly Opposed.  (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Support for repeal has ranged from 50% to 63% in weekly tracking since Democrats in Congress passed the law in March of last year.

But only 41% of voters say it’s at least somewhat likely the law will be repealed.  That’s down eight points from early January and the lowest level measured since the beginning of October.  Forty-six percent (46%) say repeal is unlikely.  These findings include 17% who say it’s Very Likely and 16% who feel it’s Not At All Likely.

While most Republicans (54%) believe repeal is at least somewhat likely, 50% of Democrats and a plurality (49%) of voters not affiliated with either political party disagree.

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on January 29-30, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology. 

Roughly half (49%) of all voters say the health care plan will be bad for the country.  That figure has remained in the high 40s and low 50s since passage of the bill in late March of last year.  Forty-one percent (41%) say the new plan will be good for the United States.

Forty-four percent (44%) believe repeal of the health care law will be good for the economy, while 30% say it will hurt economic conditions in the country.  Fourteen percent (14%) feel repeal will have no impact on the economy, and another 12% are not sure.  These findings have changed little since April 2010.

When it comes to job creation, voters have mixed feelings.  Thirty-two percent (32%) say repeal will create new jobs, the highest finding since last August, but 36% disagree. Thirty-three percent (33%) are not sure what the job impact will be.

Although the Congressional Budget Office claims repealing the health care law will increase the federal budget deficit, a plurality of voters disagrees with that assessment.  At the same time, most voters feel free market competition will do more to cut health care costs than government regulation.

Democrats continue to believe more strongly in the health care law than do Republicans and unaffiliateds.

Voters trust Republicans, by a 52% to 38% margin, more than Democrats to handle the issue of health care.  In December, Democrats had a slight 45% to 43% edge, but it was the first time President Obama’s party had led on the issue since July of last year.

On a list of 10 important issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports, health care falls second behind the economy in terms of importance to voters.

Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only. 

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Rasmussen Reports is an electronic media company specializing in the collection, publication and distribution of public opinion polling information.  We poll on a variety of topics in the fields of politics, business and lifestyle, updating our site’s content on a news cycle throughout the day, everyday.

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Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade. To learn more about our methodology, click here