Quick health care repeal has minimal support

Only 20 percent want Obamacare dropped with no alternative in place, poll finds.

WASHINGTON — The vast majority of Americans do not support Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act without enacting a replacement, a nationwide poll finds.

Nearly half the country does not want the law, commonly called Obamacare, to be repealed at all.

Even among those who want to see the law rolled back, most say Congress should wait to vote on repeal until the details of a replacement plan have been announced.

Just 2 in 10 Americans support the GOP strategy to quickly vote for repeal and work out details of a replacement later, according to the poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

President-elect Donald Trump and senior GOP lawmakers indicated this week that they plan to move quickly to sweep away major pillars of Obamacare, insisting they have a mandate from voters to scrap the 2010 health care law.

But Republicans haven’t detailed how they will replace the law’s coverage program, which has helped extend health insurance to more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans.

They have pledged to develop a replacement over the next several years, which, they say, will protect the tens of millions of people who depend on the law’s protections. Those promises haven’t convinced major medical groups, patient advocates or many conservative health care experts, who have voiced concerns that this “repeal and delay” strategy could sow chaos in insurance markets and jeopardize Americans’ access to health insurance.

Democrats, meanwhile, are stepping up efforts to highlight the risks of scrapping the law with no replacement in place.

There is also skepticism about Trump’s ability to guarantee better health care at lower costs, as the president-elect has said he will do. Slightly more than half of Americans say they are not confident that Trump can deliver on his health care promise, while 48 percent say they are.

That split largely parallels a long-standing divide in public opinion about the Affordable Care Act that has largely broken along partisan lines, with Democrats viewing the law favorably and Republicans unfavorably.

Nearly two-thirds of Republicans believe that repealing Obamacare should be a top priority for Trump and the new Congress. Just 21 percent of Democrats and 32 percent of independents feel that way.

The poll, conducted Dec. 13-19 among 1,204 adults, has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.