The irony is that the Affordable Care Act is full of programs and rules which were added solely because the GOP leadership demanded that without them they would not vote for the final bill. The President agreed to one concession after another and in the end he got absolutely nothing for all the compromises that he made. Even the core of the ACA, the idea of a personal mandate, was the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, which they originally proposed as an alternative to what was being pushed by Bill & Hillary Clinton in the 90's, which was much closer to what many people on the Left really wanted, some sort of true single-payer system. It was Mitt Romney and his Massachusetts health care plan, based on the Heritage Foundation outline, that seemed to be an acceptable alternative to 'Hillarycare' and which many Republicans actually embraced, that is until it became the basis for 'Obamacare'.
And these so-called 'polls' that the Right keeps quoting showing the barely a majority of Americans like the idea of Obamacare, some even showing a slight majority disapproving. What they don't tell you is that there is a consistent 15% or so of those who disapprove do so because it's does NOT go far enough, that it's not a single-payer system. To suggest that somehow this consistent 15% would support whatever the GOP might offer as an alternative is a fantasy of the highest order.
So while it is accurate to say that in the end, the Affordable Care Act was passed only by the majority, it's totally false to suggest that the majority crammed down the throats of the minority something which they had no hand in creating.
OCU
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