Polling firm Gallup reported Nov. 18 that its most-recent annual health-care poll, conducted Nov. 7-10, found that 56 percent of U.S. adults now say it’s not the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health-care coverage. Before 2009, “a clear majority of Americans consistently had said the government should take responsibility for ensuring […]
Polling firm Gallup reported Nov. 18 that its most-recent annual health-care poll, conducted Nov. 7-10, found that 56 percent of U.S. adults now say it’s not the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health-care coverage.
Before 2009, “a clear majority of Americans consistently had said the government should take responsibility for ensuring that all Americans have health care,” Gallup said in its survey report. That view peaked in 2006, when 69 percent of Americans said it’s the federal government’s duty to make sure all Americans have health-care coverage, while only 28 percent said it wasn’t.
“Attitudes began to shift significantly in 2007, and continued to change through the time President Barack Obama took office in 2009,” the Gallup report prepared by Joy Wilke said. “Americans who feel healthcare coverage is not the federal government’s responsibility have been in the clear majority the past two years.”
Attitudes across all three partisan groups have shifted away from the view that ensuring health-care coverage is government’s role, but most especially among Republicans and independents, according to Gallup.
Since 2000, the share of Republicans believing the government should not be responsible for ensuring all Americans have health coverage has risen from 53 percent to 86 percent, according to Gallup.
The polling firm found that 55 percent of independents currently say the government should not be involved with health care, up from 27 percent in 2000.
The percentage of Democrats holding this view now stands at 30 percent, up from 10 percent in 2006 and 19 percent in 2000, Gallup found.
“The continuing implementation of the [national health-care law] over the coming months and years will surely continue to shape Americans’ attitudes toward the federal government’s role in this area,” Wilke wrote. “It is not clear how the [law’s] troubled rollout to date will affect attitudes over the next year. But as the debate about the implementation of the new healthcare law has unfolded, Americans have become less likely than ever to agree that the federal government should be responsible for making sure that all Americans have healthcare.”
Gallup said it conducted telephone interviews of a random sample of 1,039 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points.
