Recent polls showing Obamacare at a 39 percent approval rating are misleading. Disapproval doesn’t mean that Obamacare should be repealed.

Many people who disapprove want to keep the Affordable Care Act because repealing it would be a step backward. My friend Don, for example, disapproves of the ACA because he favors a single-payer system. He does not want to repeal the ACA because repealing the law would hurt the poor and the middle-class.

A Bloomberg survey asks the right question: What do you want as an outcome? The Bloomberg survey shows that 51 percent want to make small improvements to the ACA, 13 percent want to keep the law as is, and only 34 percent want to repeal it.

A substantial segment of the disapprovers want to fix the broken parts of the ACA instead of rejecting the whole package.

The website obamacarefacts.com/obamacare-poll/ contains a lot of good information about the Affordable Care Act and has some interesting polling results. Although Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing, “Obamacare” is less popular than “the Affordable Care Act,” according to approval polling.

The features in Obamacare are all popular except for the insurance mandates. Surveys show that support for Obamacare increases when people learn more about the specifics of the law. If you are not sure about Obamacare, I urge you to check it out for yourself.

Peter Konieczko

Scarborough