Registered voters say President Barack Obama’s health care reform bill “has been bad for America” and half say their costs have gone up since its passage, according to a new poll set to be released Tuesday.
The Resurgent Republic poll, obtained in full, exclusively by The Daily Caller, asked registered voters whether they support the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that passed Congress with the president’s support. Forty-eight percent said they opposed the bill while 41 percent indicated they supported it. Independents said they opposed the bill 54 percent to 34 percent.
The survey asks the question a second way, presenting the respondents with two arguments. The first says that the bill has “been good for America” as “[i]t has provided health insurance to those who didn’t have it, is controlling health care costs, and holding the insurance companies accountable.” The other argument says that the bill has been “bad for America” because it has raised “health care costs, cut 400 billion dollars from Medicare, and injected government bureaucrats into health care decisions.”
Respondents again came out opposing the bill, 49 percent to 44 percent. When asked whether their health care costs have gone up, down or stayed the same since the bill’s passage, 50 percent indicated that their costs have gone up. Only two percent indicated that their costs had gone down while 43 percent said their costs have stayed the same.
Presented with two arguments on President Obama’s jobs bill, which was presented as keeping “teachers in the classroom, police and firefighters on the job” and repairing “crumbling infrastructure,” respondents came out in favor of the bill, 50 percent to 44 percent. The opposing argument presented the bill as “exactly like the first Obama stimulus bill that did not work” and just added to the deficit while the unemployment rate went up. However, independents came out in opposition to the bill, 47 percent to 45 percent.
Respondents also came out in favor of “raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations.” When presented with the argument that “this is the wrong time to raise taxes on anyone” and that raising taxes means “more money going to the government, and less money in the economy that businesses can use to hire workers and create new jobs,” respondents supported the tax increase argument 54 percent to 42 percent. Independents supported increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, 53 percent to 44 percent.
When the same pro-tax argument was put against an alternative anti-tax argument, that the “top ten percent of earners already pay over two-thirds of all federal income taxes… and U.S. companies pay a thirty-five percent tax rate, more than most European countries,” the results were similar. Fifty-three percent said they favored raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations while 43 percent said they opposed it.
The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters from October 30 to November 2 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Resurgent Republic is a 501(c)(4) organization which, according to its website, “promote[s] conservative free market principles such as lower taxes and economic growth, and support strong national defense policies.”