The Kaiser Family Foundation polled Americans last week, right after the election, asking what they want to see happen next with the health-care law. Most notably, they saw support for repeal plummet to an all-time low:
It’s worth noting that this isn’t exactly Americans gravitating toward the health-care law: Support for expanding the law or keeping it as is held steady at 49 percent. Those who no longer support repeal seem to have drifted into the “don’t know” category, about what should happen next.
In a lot of ways, this reflects larger shifts in thinking about the health-care law in the wake of President Obama’s reelection. There’s a general acknowledgement that the law, whose main components roll out in 2014, is here to stay. “Repeal of the whole thing, I just don’t see now how that’s possible,” Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a conservative health-care think tank, told the Hill’s Sam Baker shortly after the election.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page framed it a bit differently, declaring that while “Regulations can be adapted or phased out…the Affordable Care Act will spread like termites in the national economy.” In public opinion and public commentary, these are a lot of ways of saying the same thing: The health-care law is here to stay.
