text: Obamacare is getting more popular with voters even as President Donald Trump moves to get rid of the landmark health-care law. 
   
   A total of 45 percent of registered voters say they approve of Obamacare, compared to 45 percent who oppose the law, a new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds. 
   
   Since early January — weeks before Trump moved into the White House — there has been a drop of seven percentage points among voters opposed to Obamacare. 
   
   At the same time, there has been increase of four percentage points among voters who approve of the law, according to the poll. 
   
   "As the threat of the Affordable Care Act's repeal has moved from notional to concrete, our weekly polling has shown an uptick in the law's popularity, and fewer voters support repealing the law," Kyle Dropp, Morning Consult's co-founder and chief research officer, told Politico for an article on the findings. 
   
   The poll, which questioned 2,013 registered voters over three days late last week, has a margin of error of 2 percentage points. 
   
   Trump and fellow Republicans who hold control of Congress have said they want to repeal the ACA and replace it with new health-care legislation. The GOP says that Obamacare is a failed program that has led to increasing premiums and onerous out-of-pocket charges to many Americans. 
   
   Obamacare supporters retort that the law has expanded coverage to 20 million Americans, many of whom could not afford insurance previously, and that the law should be improved, not thrown out. 
   
   In recent weeks, Republican repeal-and-replace plans have been met with vocal opposition at congressional town halls, and concerns among insurers about the potential loss of millions of customers of individual plans sold on and off of Obamacare marketplaces. 
   
   The Politico/Morning Consult poll revealed that voters are split — widely — when they were asked, in general terms, what they would like to see done with Obamacare. 
   
   But the poll also revealed, with one glaring exception, that more voters tended to support keeping key provisions of Obamacare than favored repealing them. 
   
   The findings indicate that a slight majority of voters would approve of either wholesale repeal or the law, or partial repeal. 
   
   A total of 24 percent of voters said they want to see Obamacare completely repealed. Another 27 percent want to see it "repealed in part," according to the poll. 
   
   
   
   Only 12 percent said they want to see the law "kept as is." Another 26 percent said they want to see Obamacare expanded. 
   
   Ten percent said they didn't know, or had no opinion. 
   
   However, when voters were asked about nine separate provisions in the ACA, they wanted to keep eight of them. 
   
   The only provision that voters want to get rid of is Obamacare's individual mandate, which requires nearly all Americans to have some form of health coverage or face a possible tax penalty. 
   
   A total of 57 percent of voters say they want that mandate repealed. Just 28 percent of voters say they want it left as is. 
   
   If the mandate were to be repealed, many insurers would be likely to stop selling Obamacare plans, because they would be left with fewer healthier customers buying coverage, and with a disproportionate number of less-healthy customers. 
   
   On the other hand, 65 percent of voters said the ACA provision that bars insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing health conditions should be left as is, with just 22 percent wanting it repealed. 
   
   Another 61 percent favored keeping the provision that gives low-income people subsidies to help pay for health insurance, and slightly more voters favored providing funding to states that expand Medicaid to cover low-income people. 
   
   Almost 60 percent of voters favored requiring employers with 50 or more full-time workers to offer them health coverage. A total of 55 percent favor requiring insurers to cover prescription birth control. 
   
   And 63 percent of voters said they want to keep the ACA provision that allows people under age 26 to be covered by their parents' health plans. 
   
   Support was less strong for — but still greater than opposition to — ACA provisions that tax medical device manufacturers, and that remove lifetime and annual limits on how much money insurers can pay out for an individual's care. ||||| (CNN) Congressional Republicans struggling over how to repeal Obamacare are stuck on a key problem: what to do with the millions of people in 31 states covered under the dramatic expansion of Medicaid the law enabled. 
   
   So they have privately turned to a handful of governors to help resolve the issue -- including Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, according to several sources involved in the talks. The hope, according to congressional sources, is to let the governors cut a deal on an issue that directly impacts their states and let the White House and Republican leaders endorse the plan that eventually emerges. 
   
   The discussions underscore another key point: While President Donald Trump promises to soon unveil his own health care plan, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are drafting the bill -- while the Republican governors are likely to be the driving force behind the major entitlement reform over Medicaid coverage. 
   
   The stakes for Republicans are already high. At town halls this week, GOP lawmakers are getting earfuls from voters unhappy with possible rollbacks to Obamacare, and at times struggling to defend a replacement bill that doesn't yet exist. 
   
   At the center of the talks are four governors who have taken different approaches to Medicaid: Walker and Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, whose states did not expand Medicaid under the law; and two governors from states that did: Kasich and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. The discussions are likely to continue at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington this week, and as Kasich privately meets later this week with Trump at the White House. 
   
   "There are 700,000 Ohioans who now get care who didn't have it before," Kasich told CNN's Jim Sciutto on Sunday's "State of the Union," defending his state's Medicaid expansion. "And to turn our back on them makes no sense." 
   
   The thinking is that if these four can cut a deal, it will help resolve an issue that GOP leaders say is currently the biggest hurdle in putting together a plan to repeal President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. But they have a monumental task: resolving concerns from conservatives who want to turn Medicaid into a block grant program and alleviate fears from politicians who hail from states that accepted federal dollars to expand coverage for low-income adults under Obamacare. 
   
   "We're going to have to find a solution that accommodates those concerns," House Speaker Paul Ryan said last week. 
   
   Republicans are hoping to unveil a plan in March that could be voted on within the next several weeks. They are under a time constraint because they are using fast-track budget rules that will allow them to avoid a filibuster in the Senate and pass a repeal bill on a party-line vote. 
   
   The party is still divided over key issues -- including how far to take the repeal bill. Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus want to pass a full-blown repeal bill that mirrors a plan that Congress approved in 2015 -- and Obama vetoed -- which would also repeal the Medicaid expansion. 
   
   Yet top Senate Republicans privately say that such an approach would not pass their chamber. 
   
   Tax credits and health savings accounts 
   
   Moreover, a number of Republicans are demanding that the repeal bill also include some new provisions to help replace the law. As part of that approach, Republicans want to include in the repeal bill tax credits to help people purchase health insurance and reforms to Health Savings Accounts that would allow families to put more money into the accounts. 
   
   Yet, Senate budget rules limit how much of the health care law can be replaced through the process known as "reconciliation," meaning that the GOP will have to rely on skeptical Democrats to pass other health care bills and on Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price to take executive action on other fronts. 
   
   But several people involved in the discussions say the biggest challenge right now is how to resolve the Medicaid dilemma. The fear among many Republicans is that gutting the program could leave many low-income individuals in their states without health care coverage if there's no viable alternative to replace it. Republicans are considering a plan -- advocated by Ryan -- where states would receive federal funding based on a formula created by a state's per capita Medicaid population. 
   
   While it's uncertain where they'll come down, Walker's support is seen as critical since he could presumably help sell the deal to conservatives who want to gut the entitlement program altogether. 
   
   "Gov. Walker and other governors around the country are on the front lines of this effort," said Tom Evenson, a Walker spokesman. "And they want to partner with the federal government to provide affordable and accessible health care." 
   
   The talks on the Hill over health care are being driven by five key Republicans: Ryan, Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, Senate Health Chairman Lamar Alexander, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden and Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady. 
   
   And the Energy and Commerce Committee met in January with more than a dozen GOP governors from states that expanded Medicaid and those that did not, and discussions are continuing between the governors and the lawmakers, a committee aide said. 
   
   How the four GOP governors go along with the plan also could influence key senators from those states -- including Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, who is up for re-election in 2018 and whose governor is involved in the talks. And if Kasich cuts a deal, it could influence key Ohio Republicans in both chambers.
target: – John Boehner could only laugh when he heard Republicans talking about quickly repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. “Republicans never ever agree on health care," Politico quotes the former house speaker as saying Thursday. Despite President Trump saying to expect a plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare by mid-March, Boehner says an ACA repeal is only "happy talk" and definitely "not going to happen." He says Republicans will eventually settle on only slight changes to ObamaCare and that "most of the framework" will remain in place. Republican lawmakers are currently being beset at town halls with constituents worried about losing their health insurance. CNBC reports a new poll found an even 45% split between voters who approve of ObamaCare and those who oppose it. That's a 4-point increase for the approve side and a 7-point decrease for the oppose side just since early January. The poll found only 24% of voters want the ACA completely repealed; 26% want to see it expanded. Republicans in Congress are now turning to a handful of Republican governors—John Kasich and Scott Walker, among others—to help them figure this mess out, sources tell CNN. Lawmakers apparently want the governors to figure out what to do about the millions of people who received coverage with the expansion of Medicaid under ObamaCare.