When asked specifically what healthcare issues voters want to hear the presidential candidates talk about, the Affordable Care Act and healthcare costs were the most common answers, indicated by 37 percent and 36 percent of respondents, respectively. The third most popular response was increasing access for the uninsured (26 percent), followed by Medicare (10 percent).
Republicans and Democrats voiced different concerns regarding the ACA, according to Kaiser. The healthcare issue most Republican voters said they want to hear the candidates discuss is the ACA, indicated by 45 percent of respondents. Among those, 28 percent explicitly mentioned wanting discussions to center around opposing or repealing the law. Among Democratic voters, increasing access for the uninsured was the most popular issue (indicated by 39 percent of respondents), followed by healthcare costs (37 percent) and the ACA (30 percent).
The public is relatively evenly divided on next steps for the ACA. Forty-four percent of respondents said the healthcare law should either be expanded (30 percent) or kept as is (14 percent), while 43 percent of respondents said the law should either be scaled back (11 percent) or repealed entirely (32 percent).
Broken down by political party, 75 percent of Democrats said the law should be expanded or kept unchanged, compared to just 18 percent of Republicans who hold the same opinion. Nearly three quarters of Republicans (74 percent) believe the law should be scaled back or repealed.
Of the 32 percent of respondents who said the ACA should be repealed, 12 percent said it should be replaced with a Republican-sponsored alternative, 12 percent said it should not be replaced, 6 percent said there should be a different solution and 2 percent did not provide an answer.
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