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Americans like the Republican Obamacare replacement in theory — but they don't like what it does

Two new polls show that while Americans generally are fine with the AHCA, they don't like its changes or expect better outcomes for healthcare.

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The American public is warm to House Republicans' plan to overhaul the US healthcare system, but it doesn't like the actual changes proposed by the law, two new polls suggest.

A poll from Morning Consult and Politico found that 46% of Americans approved of the new GOP bill, the American Health Care Act, while only 35% disapproved.

But respondents were not as keen on the legislation's proposed policies.

Morning Consult and Politico found that the most popular parts of the new healthcare bill were actually holdover elements from the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law better known as Obamacare. The provision that insurers can't deny coverage based on a preexisting condition — an ACA holdover — was the most popular element, with 71% of those surveyed approving of the idea.

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Second-most popular was allowing children to stay on their parents' insurance until they turn 26 — also an ACA provision — with 68% support.

The major changes in the AHCA, on the other hand, had lower support, with the elimination of the individual mandate to purchase health insurance and the increase in allowances for health-savings accounts coming in as the most popular new provisions (50% approval for each).

Below 50% support was the rollback of Medicaid expansion funding after 2020 (48%), replacing income-based tax credits with flat, age-based tax credits (39%), and prohibiting states from using federal funding for Planned Parenthood (38%).

The least popular element was the provision designed to encourage people to maintain health coverage: a 30% increase in premiums for people who allow their insurance to lapse in the year before. That had only 18% support. The individual mandate from the ACA, in which people paid a tax for not having insurance, received 37% support.

At the same time, the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank focused on health policy, found that Americans generally thought the outcomes from the AHCA would be negative.

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Kaiser found that 48% of people surveyed thought the costs for those buying their own insurance would increase under the AHCA, against just 23% of people who expected costs to decrease. The poll also found that more people thought the AHCA would increase costs rather than decrease them for every group — young, elderly, urban, rural, and low-income — except high-income Americans.

The survey was conducted before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released an unflattering report on the AHCA on Monday.

The Kaiser poll found that 49% of respondents supported Obamacare, versus 44% who disapproved of the law, the second month in a row in which the law was above water in terms of approval and its highest rating since 2010. Also, 51% of people surveyed by Kaiser said lawmakers should not vote to repeal the ACA, while 45% supported some sort of repeal vote.

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