Less than two years after the nation’s new health care law kicked into gear, more than six in 10 California voters are embracing its reforms, and an overwhelming majority are also tipping their hats to the way it’s been implemented in the Golden State, according to a new Field Poll.
And while most California Republicans continue to oppose the Affordable Care Act, nearly half of GOP voters say the law they deride as “Obamacare” has met several of its key goals here — from encouraging more previously uninsured people to get coverage to providing health insurance buyers with better consumer protections.
“Even a plurality of Republicans are willing to grant that the state has been successful in many of these areas,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll.
For the first time, he said, the new survey shows majorities of California voters in all major regions of the state, all races and ethnicities, and all age groups back the law.
Field’s ninth annual health policy survey, funded by the California Wellness Foundation, comes on the heels of other surveys done in California that reflect the positive feelings many residents have about the health law. Nationally, however, recent polls show that only slightly more people favor the law than oppose it.
Support in 2010, when Congress passed the law, started at 52 percent in California and has grown to 62 percent, while over the same period opposition has decreased from 38 percent to 33 percent.
DiCamillo said one of the reasons opposition appears to be melting away is that opponents who once feared that the law would increase the cost of their own or their family’s health insurance now realize that didn’t come to pass. And, he said, publicity surrounding the success stories of a growing number of people now insured in California has shown voters that the “law is actually doing what it was intended to do.”
Oakland resident Ruth Thompson, a Democrat who took part in the Field survey, agreed. She said her 24-year-old niece had just graduated from college and was working as a substitute teacher when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Because of the Affordable Care Act she was able to stay on her mother’s health plan and receive lifesaving treatment. Without it, Thompson said, she could have died.
“It felt like a miracle that the law came out when it did and that she was able to get the treatment she needed,” said Thompson, 61, a site manager for a social services agency.
Hayward resident Melissa Sigars said she couldn’t afford health insurance before the Affordable Care Act became law and feared that insurance companies marketing individual plans were trying to scam her.
“There were too many steps and too much paperwork. It was overwhelming,” said Sigars, 36. “Now, I feel like I know what I’m getting for the money.”
Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, said the poll results are “really a testament to the thousands of people across the state saying, ‘Let’s make this work and not focus on the politics of it.'”
He was astounded, for example, to see that 48 percent of the voters under 65 have personally visited the Covered California website, up from 36 percent last year.
“I’m heartened and a little bit baffled,” Lee said. “The vast majority of them have employer-based or other coverage. The fact that there is that much interest in health care reform means they may not have a personal need, but may have an interest for a family member or friend. It says a lot about California in general.”
Since its debut in October 2013, Covered California has enrolled 1.3 million Californians while Medi-Cal, the state’s health program for the poor that was expanded under Obamacare, has enrolled almost 4 million people since January 2014.
The survey also found voter support is growing for extending Medi-Cal services to the state’s illegal immigrants. Today, 58 percent of the state’s registered voters favor the idea, while 39 percent are opposed. Last summer, the numbers were 51 percent to 45 percent.
In addition, two in three of the state’s likely voters say that a candidate’s position on the health law will be very important to their vote for presidential and congressional candidates in next year’s election.
Despite that finding — and the overwhelming warming to the health care law revealed in this poll — two California Republicans running for statewide political office say they will try to repeal it or change it if elected.
Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, R-Oceanside, who is running for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat in 2016, said people were promised by the Obama administration that they could keep their doctors on their new plans, but often found out they couldn’t.
One of his GOP opponents, Lafayette resident Tom Del Beccaro, a former California Republican Party chairman, said he would try to repeal the law because many people face such high deductibles under the Covered California plans that it discourages them from getting medical care.
DiCamillo thinks Republicans will continue to denounce Obamacare to snag a spot in the primary. If one of them makes it to the general election against a Democrat like Attorney General Kamala Harris, he said, “they will probably not want to talk about it as much — they certainly would not be in the majority with the overall electorate.”
The poll of 1,555 California registered voters was conducted over the phone from June 25 to July 16. While the majority of the interviews were conducted in English, 328 were done in foreign languages and dialects. The overall poll has an error rate of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
Contact Tracy Seipel at tseipel@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5343. Follow her at Twitter.com/taseipel.
