Views on President Barack Obama's federal health-care law remain unchanged ahead of an upcoming Supreme Court decision that could potentially gut the law, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Just 8 percent of Americans say the law is working well, while a plurality – 40 percent – believes it needs only minor modifications to improve it. Those numbers are identical to the results from an April 2014 NBC/WSJ poll on the same question.
In the new poll, another 25 percent of Americans say the law needs a major overhaul – down three points from April 2014.
See the full poll results here.
And an additional 25 percent believe it should be “totally eliminated” – up four points from a year ago.
(These mostly unchanged results stand in contrast to a recent CBS poll, which found the health law’s popularity increasing, though that’s a different question from what the NBC/WSJ poll asked.)
Of course, the political parties are split when it comes to the health-care law: A combined 77 percent of Democrats say the law is working well or needs only minor modifications, while a combined 84 percent of Republicans believe it needs a major overhaul or should be totally eliminated.
In the next few days, the Supreme Court is set to rule on whether it's legal under the health-care law for the government to award subsidies to residents of states that are operating federal-based insurance marketplaces instead of state-based ones.
The NBC/WSJ poll finds that the public is divided over the Supreme Court's ideology, with 39 percent believing it's too liberal, 38 percent saying it's too conservative and only 6 percent saying it's "about right."
Once again, there's a difference by party: 63 percent of Democrats think the court is too conservative, while 69 percent of Republicans believe it's too liberal. Independents are split – 33 percent too liberal, 31 percent too conservative.
The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted June 14-18 of 1,000 adults (nearly 400 via cell phone), and it has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.
