Majority supports Obamacare for first time: Gallup poll

More than half of Americans support Obamacare, according to a Gallup poll taken amid floundering Republican efforts to scrap the law after seven years of promising a replacement.

The pollsters said 55 percent now approve of the Affordable Care Act, compared to just 42 percent right after the election.

It is the first time that Gallup found majority support for the law since it started asking about it in 2012.

People of every political affiliation were more likely to support the law than in November, driven in large part by independents, who’ve increased their support by 17 percentage points compared to 10 each for Republicans and Democrats.

However, only a quarter of Americans want to keep Obamacare as it is. About 40 percent want to reform the law, while 30 percent want to repeal and replace it.

Obamacare has consistently split public opinion since Democrats muscled it to passage in 2010 without a single Republican vote, with many polls tilting to the negative side.

In general, Americans tend to like its insurance guarantees and benefits but despise the individual mandate requiring people to hold insurance or pay a tax.

Yet approval ratings have ticked upward of late, as Republicans who control Congress and the White House fail to rally around a replacement plan that can satisfy disparate wings of their own party.

“Trump vehemently attacked the Affordable Care Act during his presidential campaign — and in the days immediately following his election, the public appeared to agree with him,” Gallup said. “However, in the five months since, as Republicans’ efforts to replace the law with one of their own have failed to get off the ground, enough Americans have changed their minds about the ACA to create a majority favoring it for the first time.”

House Republicans are trying to revive talks on health reform, though Speaker Paul D. Ryan says the discussions are in the “conceptual” phase.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus who blasted the first bill as “Obamacare lite” are reviewing a White House idea that would let states apply for a waiver from Obamacare insurance regulations that have been blamed for making coverage more expensive for healthier people.

The waivers would eliminate parts of Obamacare requiring a minimum set of benefits in plans and a provision known as “community rating,” which requires insurers to charge the same amount to people who are the same age and live in the same area.

No one’s produced legislative text, however, and the proposal could alienate moderates who fear the proposed changes would allow insurers to charge sick people exorbitantly higher prices than healthy ones, even if insurers couldn’t technically deny those with pre-existing conditions.

The House GOP’s own website says Americans “should never be denied coverage or charged more because of a pre-existing condition.”