7 years ago, Raine and I stood with several hundred strangers outside the U.S. House of Representatives waiting for an end to the debate and a vote on the ACA. We even got to go inside and sit in the gallery for 10 minutes while the debate was occurring. Ultimately, as the evening wore on, the bill passed, and the ACA became law. The Democratic representatives walked back to their offices to cheers from
most of the crowd (there were a few dissenters, grousing about "the nanny state").
The ACA was called "ObamaCare", meant as a pejorative. In reality, it was healthcare insurance reform, providing relief to citizens being brutalized by their insurance companies, whose ever-increasing ravenous need to grow profits resulted in dropped coverage, increasing rates, and denial of payment - among other abuses.
The most hated part of the ACA is the "personal mandate". This is a tax break that people don't get if they don't have insurance. The rationale behind it was to ensure the insurance companies didn't bail out of the state exchanges. A certain segment of society considers that as the Federal government forcing everyone to have insurance (it really must be confusing to them to choose between helping corporations, and adhering to their small-government tenets).
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