After the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act on June 28, Nina Vaccaro (pictured above), the executive director of the Southside Coalition of Community Health Clinics, said it was time to look to implementation. (José Martinez/OnCentral)
Americans were divided before Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and a national poll says they still are.
But that survey says something else, too: Americans think it's time to move on.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 47 percent of a group of 1,239 American adults say they approve of the Supreme Court's decision, which upheld the vast majority of the ACA, allowing the hotly-debated individual mandate to survive as a tax. Another 43 percent oppose, and respondents' views were, as usual, "heavily influenced by party identification."
The poll also queried participants on whether opponents of the law should continue to try to block the law from being implemented. Overall, 56 percent said anti-ACA folks should stop their efforts to block the law and "move on to other national efforts," while only 38 percent said those efforts to block the ACA's implementation were worthwhile.
Keeping with the partisan trend, a respondent's party was a fairly reliable predictor of his or her answer: 82 percent of Democrats said opponents should stop their efforts to block the ACA and 69 percent of Republicans said they should keep them up.
The poll also found that Democrats' enthusiasm for the law surged – the percentage of liberals who have "very favorable" views on the law jumped from 31 percent to 47 percent since May – and Republicans' opposition to the law remained solid, with 64 percent claiming "very unfavorable" views of the legislation.
The survey also confirmed that among families who make less than $40,000 annually, Medicaid is a "very important" program (57 percent) or at least "somewhat important" (17 percent).
South L.A. reaction to the ruling was mixed, but local health providers and advocates said they were elated.
