The majority of Americans are in favor of the Affordable Care Act despite disagreement over the healthcare reform law by the presidential contenders in the 2024 Biden-Trump rematch.
As of April, 62% of Americans held a favorable opinion of the ACA, while 37% viewed it unfavorably, according to a survey by KFF. Support for the law has increased slightly over the past six months; in February, 59% of respondents approved of the ACA, while 39% disapproved.
This finding is noteworthy given the contentious nature of the healthcare reform law, enacted in 2010 by President Barack Obama, in the 2024 presidential election.
Former President Donald Trump has stated that he plans to improve the 2010 healthcare law — not terminate it — and make it "far less expensive." Many Republican lawmakers have expressed reluctance toward the idea of taking another shot at replacing the Affordable Care Act.
Meanwhile, Democrats have embraced the healthcare law, highlighting its historic enrollment numbers. Over 20 million people have enrolled in individual insurance plans on the ACA exchange for 2024, marking the highest total enrollment in the exchange's history.
The ACA is the most challenged statute in American history, including its seven Supreme Court challenges in a decade, according to professors at Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University.
Attention to the law diminished during one election cycle. The 2022 elections were the first in over a decade in which the security of the ACA was not a central issue, and the Republican Party set aside its long-running campaign to repeal it. However, the 2024 presidential election campaigns have reignited focus on the law.
Most recently, in 2021, the Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to the ACA, in which plaintiffs argued that the law should be struck down due to the 2017 elimination of the ACA's tax penalty. At the time of the Republicans' push for a "skinny repeal" of the ACA in 2017, Newsweek identified at least 70 GOP-led attempts to repeal, modify or limit the Affordable Care Act since its inception.