Public opinion on the individual mandate that requires everyone to purchase insurance in the Affordable Care Act is split, according to a new poll from Urban Institute.
Urban Institute found in its latest Health Reform Monitoring Survey that "more people support repealing the individual mandate than support keeping it, but almost one-third are not sure whether it should be kept or repealed."
- 29 percent support keeping the individual mandate
- 39 percent support repealing the individual mandate
- 30 percent are unsure
When divided by political leanings, those who favor Republicans mostly favor a repeal, and less than half of those who lean Democrat want to keep it
- 65 percent of Republican/GOP-leaning support repealing it
- 11 percent of GOP-leaning support keeping it
- 20 percent of Democrat-leaning support repealing it
- 44 percent of Democrat-leaning support keeping it
- 33 percent of independents support repealing it
- 14 percent of independents support keeping it
"We found the strongest support for repeal among adults who are older, non-Hispanic white, lower-income, less educated, and Republican," the Urban Institute reports.
"People seem to support repeal because they object to the government requirement in general or because they object to the requirement to purchase an unaffordable product, not because they object to spreading the risk of high health-care costs across the population. But even those who support repeal seem to believe in the importance of health insurance — that even healthy people need insurance and that people should not be denied medical care because they cannot afford it."