Poll: Americans overwhelmingly say Trump should try to make Obamacare work

President Donald Trump wants the Republican-controlled Senate to continue working to repeal the health care law he says is "failing," but voters – including a majority of Republicans – say they want him to try to make Obamacare work.

A new survey released Friday from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 78 percent of Americans say Trump and his administration should "do what they can to make the current health care law work."

Following the defeat of repeal legislation in the Senate last month, Trump said he prefers to let the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, "implode." According to the survey, just 17 percent support the Trump administration taking actions to "do what they can to help the law fail so they can replace it later."

But 95 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Independents, 52 percent of Republicans and 51 percent of self-identified Trump supporters said Trump should fix Obamacare rather than allow it to fail.

While analysts say the 2010 law is stabilizing on its own, Trump has not committed his administration to continuing to make payments to insurers to cover cost-sharing subsidies, resulting in uncertainty that a separate Kaiser Family Foundation analysis this week says is responsible for premium hikes an average of 19 percent over normal increases for next year.

By a nearly 3-to-1 margin, survey respondents say they prefer Republicans in Congress take a similar approach, working in a bipartisan fashion with Democrats to improve the current law, rather than repeal and replace it.

And nearly twice as many say Congress should refuse to go along with Trump's insistence that they return to work on repealing Obamacare as say they should move on to other issues.

Further, the poll suggests Republicans should be incentivized to fix the current law, as voters say they will hold the party in power responsible for any problems with it going forward: Sixty percent say Trump and the Republican Congress will get the blame for Obamacare-related issues, compared to just 28 percent who say they would blame former President Barack Obama and Democrats.

Still, some lawmakers want to press forward with repeal, despite the difficulty the House had in passing its repeal and replace legislation earlier this year, and the failure of efforts in the Senate.

On Friday, members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus moved to file a discharge petition to force House Speaker Paul Ryan to bring up a "clean" repeal bill, without a replacement plan, for a vote.

Even if they succeed in getting the majority of signatures needed to bring up the vote – a long shot – the Senate already rejected a clean repeal last month.

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