Poll finds majority support for exchanges, Medicaid, Medicare

The Kaiser Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health released polling this week demonstrating that the public is really over the fight over Obamacare, and wants states to start implementing it. They also want Medicare kept out of deficit cutting efforts.

Fifty-five percent of the public, including majorities of Republicans and Democrats, say that establishing the exchanges'a key element of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and one whose implementation has divided states along partisan political lines'is a 'top priority' for their governor and legislature [among health care policies]. [...]

'Governors are largely splitting along partisan lines on the exchanges, but the public is not. People like the idea,' said Drew Altman, President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Similarly, while some Republican governors are balking at the optional expansion of Medicaid under the ACA, more Americans (52%) say their state should expand its Medicaid program than not (42%). But on Medicaid views differ sharply by party, with two-thirds of Republicans saying they prefer to keep their state Medicaid program as is (66%) and 3 in 4 Democrats (75%) seeking a state expansion. Independents are evenly divided.

A majority of Americans (52 percent) would still like to see improvements made to the Affordable Care Act, and 40 percent says that "those opposed to the health care law should accept that it is now the law of the land and stop trying to block [its] implementation."

And what about the deficit and health care? Continue below the fold to find out.