The ACA was a repackaging of Massachusetts' "RomneyCare" that was passed by Republicans in that state. The reason this legislature was chosen was because it was thought to be a bipartisan solution to rising healthcare costs.
> Massachusetts' "RomneyCare" that was passed by Republicans in that state
FYI RomneyCare was passed by a supermajority of Democrats in the MA state legislature. They negotiated some parts with Governor Romney but the reform was not a “republican idea”. ObamaCare in general was not a republican plan - it was a moderate Democrat plan.
The central idea, the individual mandate, came from a 1989 lecture by Stuart Butler, an economist at the conservative Heritage foundation. It originated as a conservative alternative to socialized healthcare.
But in politics, the idea was pushed by democrats. The idea that Republicans came up with RomneyCare is simply false, it never would have happened if the Republican Party controlled Massachusetts. Look at actual republican controlled states and you can see what they did on health care pre-ACA and it was pretty much nothing.
People at conservative think tanks coming up with an idea doesn’t make it “republican”. In reality the party ignores many things that the heritage foundation or various other foundations or think tanks say, they’re much more focused on politics than on ideas.
The Heritage Foundation is the flagship conservative think tank, Republican and conservative are synonymous in popular usage, so yeah I think it's safe to call their proposals Republican proposals despite the fact the party can't actually enact all of them.
And if we skip ahead 4 years to 1993, a Republican Senator introduced, a bill with 20 Republican co-sponsors including Bob Dole, Orrin Hatch, and Charles Grassley called the HEART bill.
That bill included an individual mandate, vouchers for low income individuals, and protection for prexisting conditions.
Not all Republicans supported this plan, but almost half of the Republican Senators including most of the leadership supported it. I'd call that a Republican plan--a plan based squarely on the proposal from the heritage foundation.
You're just wrong. Just because no republicans voted for it doesn't mean that enormous compromise was necessary to get certain independents and conservative democrats to vote for it, which is exactly what happened. The entire legislative approach to the ACA was to get a 60 vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (and subsequently to prevent the bill from returning to the Senate because of changes made by the House), in a Senate that only had 58 democrats.
You don't believe Democrats because they compromised with Republicans to get a bill passed?
If you recall, Republicans used the filibuster in the Senate, which meant Democrats needed a 60 vote supermajority to get a healthcare bill passed. When they floated the idea of a Medicare-for-all bill, Republicans promised to filibuster in the Senate.
Democrats compromised with Republicans on policy that Republicans wrote themselves, and Republicans still filibustered and not a single one of them voted in favor of it.
If not a single Republican voted for it that means the bill is entirely the responsibility of the Democrats. It is a bill created and passed exclusively by Democrats. The Democrats passed a Republican plan without one Republican vote. The Democrats had a filibuster proof supermajority, and they decided to pass Mitt Romney's healthcare plan. But it's all the Republicans fault. Obama didn't even try for a public option like he had promised during the campaign.
