Four years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, requiring business owners to provide health benefits to their workers and consumers to purchase coverage, a majority of Americans have more negative sentiment toward the health reform law than positive, based on newly released survey data.
Approximately 53 percent of respondents said that they disapproved of the ACA, Pew Research Center revealed, after surveying approximately 3,350 adults between Feb. 27 and March 16. Meanwhile, about 41 percent said that they approved of the health care reform law.
Yet despite Americans being mostly opposed to the healthcare overhaul, a number believe that legislators should make the most of it. For example, more than 50 percent of individuals who confessed to being against the ACA said that they wanted lawmakers to "make the law work as well as possible." That's the equivalent of 30 percent of the public overall. About 1 in 5 said that they preferred elected officials do what they could to prevent it from moving forward.
In an online video with WebMD, President Barack Obama said that enough people had signed up for the healthcare law that it should be able to move forward as currently constructed. There was some question in the early days of the open enrollment period about whether enough people would sign up. Since October, based on numbers from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 5 million people have enrolled through the state and federally facilitated marketplaces.
Though medium and large employers will eventually be required to provide health benefits to their workers, that rule has been postponed. It was initially pushed back to 2015 but it was delayed until 2016 more recently. Health officials stated that this was done in an effort to provide business owners with additional time to comply.
