A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that support for the Affordable Care Act increased since its lowest approval dip in October, but Americans are still unsure of the actual provisions included in President Obama’s health care reform law. For instance, while 44 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of reform, 50 percent want to expand or keep it in place, with only 37 percent supporting repeal. A majority also favor its most popular elements like easy-to-understand benefit summaries and tax credits for small businesses:

But a surprisingly high number of voters are unaware that these these provisions are actually part of the law, with a majority falsely believing the ACA includes a new public option. A third of respondents also “think the law allows a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare”:

Kaiser suggests that public disapproval of the law has less to do with the actual provisions in the law — voters either like them or don’t know about them — and more with the “general disillusionment with the state of the country and Washington politics” (and, I would add, the long drawn out and complicated process of actually passing reform). If that’s the case, then the Democrats have a real opportunity to build support for the measure by highlighting and campaigning on some of its best features, a task that will seem less daunting as a growing number of voters begin to actually benefit from the law.

A new Gallup poll finds that while a plurality of Americans favor repeal — 47 percent to 42 percent — most still believe that it’s the “federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare,” the same basic pattern found in 2009 and 2010. Fifty-six percent also told Gallup that “they prefer a system for providing healthcare based mostly on private health insurance, rather than one that is government run”:

So while Americans oppose a law called the Affordable Care Act, they support its provisions — the individual requirement and a private system of insurance (expressed in the ACA through state-based exchanges that will offer private coverage.) These elements remain popular despite two years of daily attacks and misrepresentations, which seemed to have only heightened the public’s frustration with the political process that created the ACA, while shielding the actual substance from too much disapproval. All this is good news for reform and suggests that it will only grow in popularity once a larger number of Americans benefit from it.

A recent CNN poll also found that “52% of Americans favor mandatory health insurance, up from 44% in June. [...] 47% oppose the health insurance mandate, down from 54% in early summer.”

A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that a drop in enthusiasm among Democrats has soured the public on the Affordable Care Act, with 51 percent of respondents now saying they dislike the law and only 34 percent in favor of it. The scores represent the law’s highest unfavorability rating in the 19 months the Kaiser Family Foundation has been tracking public opinion and shows a dramatic 8 percent drop in favorability for the month of October:

Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm is behind the low numbers, Kaiser found, as support among party dropped from 65 percent to 52 percent in just one month:

Kaiser attributes the low numbers to the general dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and the GOP’s “heavy criticism of the law during recent debates.” The poll also found that health care reform is low on the list of issues that deserve more attention, as economy and jobs are still driving the national conversation and remain central to voters’ concerns.

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was abandoning CLASS (the Affordable Care Act’s long-term care program), a development that received widespread press attention and may have raised frustrations among the law’s strongest advocates — including some Democrats in Congress. The Obama administration’s willingness to defend the law in the upcoming campaign, however, suggests that support among Democrats will likely rebound.

The Hill’s Sam Baker pulls out this nugget from the latest Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll:

People seem to be forgetting what the healthcare reform law does, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The monthly tracking poll found a sharp decline in the number of people who are aware that the new law will offer financial help to people who must buy insurance on their own, rather than getting it from an employer. Last summer, 72 percent of those polled were aware of that benefit. Now it’s down to 58 percent.

Fewer than half of the respondents knew the law expands Medicaid, down from two-thirds just over a year ago. Only 29 percent knew that the law eliminates cost-sharing for some preventive services, and half said the law did not provide that benefit.

When all you hear about are the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of reform and fear-mongering about increased costs and erosion of coverage, naturally you’d be reluctant to support reform. Which is why Nancy Pelosi’s now infamous statement — “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” — may not be the most eloquently expressed sentiment, but remains true: the real test of the measure’s support will come once it is implemented and Americans actually experience its benefits.

The same, by the way, holds for all of the employer surveys about dumping coverage. Asking businesses what they’ll do about a provision that doesn’t go into effect until 2014 today — when some 40 percent are unfamiliar with its details — is just begging for the worst-case scenario that’s grounded in rumors about “big government regulation” than any serious consideration of the actual provisions in the text of the law.

A new health care tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that as the opposition to the Affordable Care Act has fallen (from 46 percent to 43 percent), a majority of Americans (53 percent) want lawmakers to expand the law or keep it, and 46 percent say they are still confused by it:

On the debt debate, Americans “see a role for reducing spending in deficit reduction,” but majorities continue to say they would not support any reductions to spending on Social Security (62 percent) or Medicare (59 percent), and almost half (48 percent) say the same about Medicaid:

A new analysis of poll data about the Affordable Care Act from 2009 to 2010 finds that public support for health reform may be higher and more consistent than previously thought. The study, published today in the newest issue of Health Affairs, shows that while support often depended on the wording of the question, on average, 57 percent of the public favored the public option, while overall support for the individual mandate averaged at 53 percent.

The study also found that despite the GOP’s best efforts to portray reform as a government takeover, the public showed consistent support for government programs. “When polling questions included phrases that described the public option as insurance, similar to Medicare, or available as an option or choice for consumers, support was higher—often considerably higher.” Even the “idea that the federal government should directly sponsor insurance—a major expansion of the government’s role—received strong support,” the researchers concluded:

In a phone interview with ThinkProgress Health, David Grande — one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia — pointed to the GOP’s (false) claim that the Paul Ryan budget protects traditional Medicare for current retirees as an indication of the fact that Republicans have not only poll tested their proposal but also learned from successes and failures of the health reform debate.