When healthcare reform passed in Massachusetts, it went through a liberal supermajority of the legislature in one of the most liberal states in the union, and they amended every change that Mitt Romney made in the process, making it [you guessed it] more liberal along the way. It was not Mitt Romney's plan. Mitt Romney vetoed most of the major parts of the legislation and the MA legislature overrode his vetoes. What passed was not his plan, he merely put a positive face on things for a few years since he had no choice.
The concept of both plans come from the same place and generally are identical, regardless of slightly differing provisions. Generally speaking, Massachusetts being a democratic state with a democratic majority is even more damning to the outcome.
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/11/13/romneycare-vs-obamacare-key-similarities-differences/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...eycare-and-obamacare-can-you-tell-difference/
To be able to pass legislation similar to that of Massachusetts' at the federal level (knowing America's history with resistance to far-reaching federal law), across vast swaths of the country that are overwhelmingly, entirely conservative, is one of the biggest ever legislative accomplishments in the history of the United States.
Its not much of an accomplishment if we're comparing it to actual changes in healthcare policy like the actual invention of medicare or social security. We're talking about expanding the role of the private insurance monopoly after all and hoping the expansion of people on medical insurance is enough to offset the flawed underpinnings of the plan.
If the Supreme Court had not made the Medicaid expansion optional for states (a huge blow to the legislation), we would have, by definition, near-universal healthcare. Regardless of the millions of people who suffered because of the Supreme Court's decision, the Affordable Care Act still featured a massive expansion of free healthcare for millions of low income Americans.
Half right and half wrong. Its undeniable that that the ACA provided healthcare to millions of more people, however your wrong in the notion that the medicaid expansion would have given people universal healthcare, as only an estimated 17 million people would actually be applied to said medicaid expansion by 2020, as opposed to 11 million under the current plan. Its more people, but its nowhere near the concept of 'universal coverage'.
https://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/8347.pdf
To ignore this in favor of useless posturing about single payer is empty rhetoric. To pretend that there's an irresistible thirst for throwing out the entirety of the ACA in favor of some idealized version of a national single payer program that will upend and eliminate our employer-provided healthcare system overnight is ludicrous.
To think that it will be easy to start from scratch and get such legislation passed the Supreme Court is nonsense (another consequence of voting for Trump over Clinton).
No one is arguing for the immediate scrapping of the ACA besides the GOP. My only point of contention is the notion that the ACA as it is now, is in any way 'universal coverage'.
The ACA should be expanded in a variety of ways in the path to an eventual single payer system. However, the fact remains that eliminating the employer based health insurance monopoly in favor of a full single payer system, or at the very least a unrestricted public insurance option is the inevitable solution to health insurance costs in the future.
If Democrats had control of congress they could easily add a single-payer(!) public option to the exchanges that were established by the ACA, and could make Medicare infinitely more accessible for millions of more Americans. None of that requires tearing down what was already accomplished.
The democrats already had a supermajority when they passed the ACA, they only passed it with Dem votes after all, and they had the option of including a public option in that bill from the start. They scrapped the public option when push came to shove without any debate about it because of Obama putting Ben Nelson and Joe Libermann in charge of the fate of the bill. Coincidentally being two of the most insurance lobbyist friendly congresspeople at that time.
With this in mind, i sincerely doubt any movement on the public option will move unless the Democrats have pressure put on them to enact a proposal in that vein.
