The Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of their December 2015 Health tracking poll earlier today, and as always, there are interesting findings about American’s relationship with the health care system.
First, most of those who are uninsured don’t know the open enrollment deadline and have not been contacted about it:
Second, over a quarter of the uninsured population did not think that the ACA mandate applied to them, and only a slim majority of the uninsured said that they plan to get health insurance over the next few months:
When people were asked why they were uninsured, almost half said that they had tried to get insurance but it was too expensive:
The Kaiser Health poll also gauged public opinion about the Affordable Care Act and, because we have a major party candidate endorsing Medicare-for-All (Bernie Sanders), that possibility as well.
For the Medicare-for-All question, the language used by the pollster was “a national health plan in which all American would get their insurance through an expanded, universal form of Medicare-for-All.”
Although the results cleaved, as expected, along partisan lines, a majority of respondents said that they either strongly favor (34%) or somewhat favor (24%) such a plan. Only 25% strongly opposed it, and 10% somewhat opposed it. In other words, 58% to 35%.
Democrats were overwhelmingly supportive: 81% either strongly or somewhat favored it, and only 15% strongly or somewhat opposed it.
Independents looked similar to the overall results, with 60% either strongly or somewhat favoring it and 34% strongly or somewhat opposing it.
Republicans were, of course, less favorable: 62% either strongly or somewhat opposed the plan, and only 30% either strongly or somewhat favored it.
The Medicare-for-All poll numbers were particularly interesting when viewed in contrast to the Affordable Care Act numbers. The greater hostility shown to the ACA than to Medicare-for-All seems likely the result of the heavy degree of partisanship with which it is discussed as well as the well-funded campaign against it. The general popularity of Medicare probably also contributes to the difference.
69% of Democrats wanted to either expand the ACA or move forward with implementing it as it is (split almost evenly between the two options), and 20% wanted to either scale it back or repeal it.
79% of Republicans wanted to scale back or repeal the law (with the latter option much more common), and only 12% wanted to implement or expand it. I would be very curious to see what percentage of Republicans polled were anti-ACA but pro-MFA.
Independents, who were supportive overall of Medicare-for-All, are mostly dissatisfied with the ACA. 56% want to scale back or repeal the law, and 33% want to implement or expand it. The pro-health care/anti-health care numbers are basically flipped from the Medicare-for-All poll question. A focus group on this would be fascinating.