What the ACA was meant to be...

My dad is still in mourning about the epic Hillary loss but I was able to have a civil discussion about the Affordable Care Act, which has proven to be anything but affordable for my middle class family. Like so many others on the left, my dad stated that the ACA wasn't what Democrats really wanted because they really don't like the idea of insurance for health care. Like so many others I've talked to on the left, the real goal is universal coverage.

I don't want to argue about whether this government bureaucracy could pull it off (which I don't believe considering the failure of the VA), but I do have a couple questions for those of you who do.

1. If government run health care for all is the best solution and the Democrats are the one's who would be the best at building the system, then why was it never proposed to the people?

2. If we did have a universal health care system, who would be able to access it? Everybody or just US citizens?

ScienceChic wrote: I'm not sure what you mean by it being proposed to the people? Should it have been a Constitutional Amendment we all voted on or do you mean something else?

What I mean is this, just tell us want you really want and let us decide if it's what we want to. If you'll recall, Obama spent a whole lot of time talking about fixing the healthcare problem before and after the election. We know he wanted single payer because he's said it in the past along with so many other Democrats.... so why not even mention it? I believe the only logical reason they didn't is because they knew it would be rejected like hot garbage. We already have a single payer system in effect now, it's called the Veterans Administration and that has been an inept agency for decades. The VA handles about 9 million vets and about 6 million actual patients. I don't think it takes much more than a grade school level of common sense to believe the creating another system that handles 320 million Americans plus everyone else that enters legally and illegally will be beyond what this government could handle.

As far as the ACA goes, the architects and Democrats in general had to either be really really bad at math and had no common sense, or they knew the math didn't add up and expected the eventual collapse. I don't believe Dems and Obama are that stupid... I believe they knew this was the best way to get w\hat they wanted eventually and they could be seen as heroes for riding in with single payer to save us from the evil insurance companies (who by the way were promised a many more policies if they went along).
What the Dems never did was look to the root cause of high insurance, which happens to be high medical costs. That's like putting a bigger furnace in your house instead of fixing the gaping hole in your wall.

Bottom line for me is that this whole thing was created through dishonesty, and if that's not the case then in was incompetence. Fortunately for the American people, their arrogance prevented them from envisioning a Republican House, Senate, and Presidency before the inevitable collapse of the horrible bill.

I'll address your #2 when I have time.

I believe it is a step stone to single payer. When record numbers of people were disliking it, those on the right said it went too far and those on the left said it didn't go far enough.

I am curious to see what the Republicans will keep and what they will throw out.