There’s no question that the Republicans lost the Obamacare wars, as Jim says. I’d just add that a lot of the features of Obamacare that allowed Republicans to organize opposition to it ended up melting away. Republicans repealed the individual mandate; bipartisan majorities repealed the Independent Payment Advisory Board and neutered many of the law’s tax increases. I wrote about the program’s evolution a couple of years ago:
How might the debate over Obamacare have gone if the program had started out the way it ended up? Most Republicans would have opposed it anyway as government overreach from their political opponents.
I would have opposed it myself, preferring an alternative that relied less on regulation and centered on making renewable catastrophic policies affordable to all.
But the opposition would have had less material to work with. Neither ideology nor partisanship kept 40 House Republicans from voting to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program early in Obama’s term, and a modified Obamacare might have both polled better and won over some of them. And without the individual mandate, two of the three Supreme Court showdowns would have been completely avoided.
This scenario could not have happened back when Obamacare was drafted and enacted because so many people on all sides thought the individual mandate was crucial to the success of the rest of the law.