“It was working until now, but a lot of rocks are being thrown at it,” said Catherine Evans, a stay-at-home mom in Silver Spring, Maryland, who said she is more likely to vote Democratic.
She noted Trump’s decision to cut off billions of dollars in subsidy payments to insurers. Insurers have raised monthly premium costs for the most popular Obamacare plans by 34 percent, on average, for 2018, according to an analysis by Avalere Health.
A majority of adults – 56 percent – said they opposed Trump’s decision on subsidies, versus 29 percent who supported it.
Evans said she would like to see both political parties work together to stabilize the insurance market, but “I don’t think right now they are capable of that. The way they are behaving is so childish and petty. It’s ridiculous.”
Healthcare experts say that Trump’s moves to undermine the law and statements declaring Obamacare as “dead” have created confusion among consumers who were planning to enroll, beginning next week, in health coverage for 2018.
Among the people surveyed by Reuters/Ipsos, 11 percent said they believed that Obamacare had ended, versus 67 percent who said the program was “still operating.”
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. Some of the poll questions ran longer than others, gathering between 3,865 and 1,545 responses each.
The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points for the entire sample, 4 percentage points for responses from Democrats and 5 percentage points for responses from Republicans.