Obamacare did do some good things that needed to be done, but essentially, everything about it was a bandaid intended to kick this shitty system down the road to the next person who had to deal with it. But hey, at least health care companies can't just turn you down because you have Diabetes or are too fat anymore.
You see, the GOP continually promised, on one hand, to tie the ACA up in legislative hurdles so it couldn't pass, or, on the other hand, vote for it if it met their requirements.
So, foolishly it turned out, the Democrats played ball with the GOP. In the end, the GOP still did everything they could to block it and voted against it en masse.
I think the error was that the Democrats believed the GOP would vote for the bill if they changed it enough. It was naive.
It was people like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Max Baucus that played a rotating merry-go-round of scapegoats that the Democratic Party used to trump up reasons why they couldn't support more progressive reforms in the healthcare legislation.
Also, it wasn't Republicans that put a WellPoint Executive Lobbyist (Elizabeth Fowler) in charge of writing large portions of the actual legislation and acting as the liaison between the White House and the Senate.
In the end we got a big pageant and self-aggrandizing back-patting session from the Democrats who called it the greatest Democratic legislative accomplishment since the Civil Rights Act... which is ironic considering that the ACA is almost the spitting image of Republican Bob Dole's Heritage Foundation sourced (and AHIP sponsored) reform plan from just a few election cycles prior.
So... the greatest Democratic policy achievement in at least a generation was to pass a Republican policy proposal. Well played Democrats. Well played.
It's true that Sen. Lieberman, in coordination with Sen. Snowe, threatened a filibuster. At the time, Sen. Lieberman was an independent, not a Democrat. So, it was an independent and a Republican.
I know that's splitting hairs, but these are valid hairs to split.
While we're splitting hairs.
Anyway, HN is a place I relish usually being devoid of pointless political conversation, so I'm just going to drop it now and go back to reading about Zippers in Erlang.
It's the unpopular part of the law. But pretty much anything that works is going to have some unpopular component that needs to be swallowed in order for the whole thing to work.
When Republicans talk about getting rid of the individual mandate, it's because they are, in actuality, trying to kill the law. When Democrats talk about it, I really don't know what's going through their heads. Leftist wonks like Krugman or Klein keep on telling them exactly why it's needed.
I don't see how it would be, unless by "subtracting individual mandate" you mean "replacing an individual mandate backed with a fee/tax/penalty for failure to comply with a universal tax, an option to select a private option with the tax refunded as a subsidy, and a default of using the public option if no private option is selected". Which, really, is retaining the individual mandate, but making it impossible to break rather than penalizing breaking it.