Had the ACA been introduced under the George W. Bush administration, it would have been condemned by Dems as half-assed, inadequate, not-universal, too supportive of private insurance and the whole employer-provided insurance model, and more a chance for big companies to profit than for Americans to get health care. It would have been lauded by Republicans as compassionate conservatism, market-driven, safely incremental, affordable, and in keeping with traditional American values.
Opposition to (and support of) it are driven almost entirely by politics (with a soupcon of women's health hysteria thrown in for the social conservatives). Which is why Mitt keeps wildly oscillating between taking credit for his part of it while threatening to get rid of it, and why it's not the centerpiece of the Democratic reelection campaign.
Me? I take the glass-half-full approach. I'd love a full glass, but better half a glass (with a resolve to continue to fill it over time) than the just-a-bit-at-the-bottom glass we had beforehand.
(h/t +Shannon Turlington)
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I think a lot of Democrats still think that. Republicans, however, are being entirely political, as far as I can tell. I take your attitude. We were never going to get the full-on universal healthcare solution passed. That wasn't being realistic. But now we have something to build on and something people won't want to give up, once the full law goes into effect.
I am probably prejudiced, but it certainly seems that the Republican political leadership (and punditry) are against it largely if not wholly for political reasons, given that it's basically a series of compromises and proposals coming from them.
As the Senate worked out, yes, we were never going to get a Canadian system (let alone a UK one), for better or worse. I take some comfort in how Social Security evolved from its initial passage to today (in, I think, overall good ways), to think that, while we will see tweaking of the ACA, the fundamental concept of it — extending health care coverage to more and more citizens — will continue to strengthen, if we can get past this election at least.
Considering that all Obamacare is, is the 1993 GOP/Hoover Institute health plan with a bit of Romneycare sprinkled on top, yes it is nothing but a conservative plan and not at all what we were promised. So yes, if the GOP was not so wedded to their plan to destroy Obama at every turn and deny him everything they can they should be able to declare victory in dragging the Dems so far right that they now have to defend a plan that Gingrich and Dole supported only 16 years before as “Socialist”.