Majority want Obamacare fix, not repeal, poll finds

WASHINGTON — Message to President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans: It’s time to make the Obama health care law more effective. Stop trying to scuttle it.

That’s the resounding word from a national poll released Friday by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey was taken following last month’s Senate derailment of the GOP drive to supplant much of President Barack Obama’s statute with a diminished federal role in health care.

Around 4 in 5 want the Trump administration to take actions that help Obama’s law function properly, rather than trying to undermine it. Trump has suggested steps like halting subsidies to insurers who reduce out-of-pockets health costs for millions of consumers.

Just 3 in 10 want Trump and Republicans to continue their drive to repeal and replace the statute. Most prefer that they instead move to shore up the law’s marketplaces, which are seeing rising premiums and in some areas few insurers willing to sell policies.

Ominously for the GOP, 6 in 10 say Trump and congressional Republicans are responsible for any upcoming health care problems since they control government. That could be a bad sign for Republicans as they prepare to defend their House and Senate majorities in the 2018 elections.

And by nearly 2-to-1, most say it’s good that the Senate rejected the GOP repeal-and-replace bill last month.

Six in 10 Republicans and Trump backers want the GOP to continue its repeal and replace drive.

And around two-thirds from those groups want Trump to stop enforcing the tax penalty Obama’s law levies on people who don’t buy coverage.

Analysts say that would roil insurance markets because fewer healthy people would buy policies, leaving them with greater proportions of expensive, seriously ill customers.