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Obama’s health care law remains huge political issue

By Steven Thomma, McClatchy Newspapers –

WASHINGTON — It was the biggest achievement of his first term, the national health care law that had eluded Democrats for 60 years. “A big (bleep)ing deal,” in the blunt words of Vice President Joe Biden.

But it could help cost President Barack Obama a second term.

Rather than cheering it on, Americans are divided over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which he signed into law two years ago Friday. The Supreme Court is weighing whether it’s constitutional. Republicans vow to repeal it if the court doesn’t strike it down. And the White House is working overtime to sell the American people on the law, before it’s too late.

It may still turn into a political triumph. Republicans, in fact, fear that if left intact, the law could take hold in the American psyche over the years, as Social Security and Medicare did generations ago.

For now, though, it hangs in the political balance, along with the fate of Barack Obama.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Obama won his 2008 election in part on the pledge to finally deliver what Democrats since Harry Truman had promised: universal health insurance. When he and the Democratic-led Congress finally delivered, the White House was giddy.

“Mr. President, you’ve done what generations of not just ordinary, but great, men and women have attempted to do,” Biden gushed at the signing ceremony in the East Room.

Yet Americans were skeptical at best even then. They were turned off by the backroom deals in Congress needed to muscle the law through, confused by the mammoth bill that even sponsors admitted they hadn’t read, and open to complaints from Republicans that it threatened the country.

“The Democrats were very ineffective selling it originally,” said Lee Miringoff, the director of the McClatchy-Marist Poll and the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion in New York. “They lost the battle of the message early on. The tea party dominated early discussion of what this is all about.”

Indeed, a backlash against the law helped fuel the rise of the tea party and the Republican landslide in congressional elections in 2010.

Today voters are divided over Obama’s health care law: not as supportive as Democrats would like, not as hostile as Republicans claim.

As the Supreme Court weighs the law’s constitutionality next week, a new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that a majority of voters want at least part of the measure thrown out. Thirty-five percent want the entire law repealed, and another 21 percent want its mandate that everyone buy insurance — its fundamental core — thrown out.

Just 34 percent want to let the law stand as is, the national poll found.

Opposition is strongest among Republicans: Fifty-three percent of them want the entire law repealed, and another 29 percent want the mandate ruled out.

Independents, too, tilt against the law, with 63 percent of them favoring repeal of the entire law or the mandate.

Democrats support the law: Sixty-five percent of them say to leave it alone.

“The polling data suggest in part the hundreds of millions of dollars that was spent attacking it,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said, speaking of all polling on the law. “What we’re focusing on is implementing it so that more and more Americans see the benefits that it brings.”

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