More than half of Americans — 57 percent — said in a new survey that they think the GOP’s sweeping package extending tax cuts and slashing welfare services will increase their health-care costs.
Thirteen percent in the CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday said that the “big, beautiful bill” will lower their health-care costs and 33 percent said there will be no impact.
While the Congressional Budget Office has not yet released a final estimate for the measure as enacted, it projected that 16 million people would lose their health insurance by 2034 under an earlier House-passed version of the bill. This analysis has been the basis for many Democrats’ messaging around health care, and health-care advocates have still warned that the final version could be devastating to communities relying on Medicaid.
The sprawling package permanently extends many of the temporary tax cuts passed by Republicans during President Trump’s first term, alongside making deep spending reductions to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other welfare programs. The measure would primarily benefit wealthy Americans, an analysis by the Yale Budget Lab found last month.
Democrats have assailed the legislation as a historic transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and are looking to message around its cuts to health care for the 2026 midterms — even if some of the package’s most significant changes don’t kick in until 2028.
Overall, six in 10 questioned in the CBS/YouGov survey disapprove of the GOP megabill. A similar percentage said that it will help wealthy people and hurt poor people. A separate AP-NORC poll released Saturday found that nearly two-thirds of Americans think the legislation will do more to help wealthy people.
In the CBS/YouGov poll, 40 percent of respondents said they thought the measure will increase their taxes. Another 32 percent said they thought their taxes will not be impacted either way.
A majority — 56 percent — said that they tied issues regarding the megabill significantly to how they evaluate President Trump’s second term. A plurality of Americans, 44 percent, said they had a “general sense” of the content of the legislation alongside some specifics. Meanwhile, roughly two in 10 — 22 percent — said they had a general idea of it but lacked specifics.
The CBS/YouGov poll was conducted between July 16 and July 18, with a sample of 2,343 and a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
