The VERSION of ACA with which we are now saddled is NOT what he campaigned on.
In fact he campaigned against it. He thrashed Hillary over a mandate.
So when you said "we stopped him from getting what he wanted," you meant you stopped him from getting the ACA minus the individual mandate?
Obama the candidate did (foolishly) argue that a mandate wasn't necessary; that's indeed an area where he
could've learned something from Mitt Romney.
As a candidate, Mr. Obama did favor requiring all children to have insurance. Once he took office, his top aides began examining other options, said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health policy adviser to Mr. Obama. The aides studied the experience of Massachusetts, which has a mandate, and health laws in other states that do not. They considered voluntary incentives to get healthy people to enroll.
Their internal modeling, Dr. Emanuel said, showed that a mandate would extend coverage to 32 million uninsured people. Without such a requirement, he said, the administration estimated it could cover 16 million people at three-fourths the cost of covering the 32 million. In the face of such evidence, Mr. Obama reversed himself.
“I don’t think it was a slam-dunk,” said Dr. Emanuel, now a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania and a regular contributor to The New York Times’s Op-Ed page. “The president did take very seriously his reputation for following what he said, so he was very reluctant to change his opinion unless he was very convinced.”
Obama's stated goal was single payer.
As near as I can tell, he claimed to be a proponent once a decade ago to a union audience as a state senator eying the Democratic Senate nomination in Illinois. At no point in recent years, in his national political career, has he indicated any strong affinity for single-payer.
He ran on a private multi-payer system, he signed a law preserving and expanding the private multi-payer system, and his administration is implementing that law now. It's odd that while Obama has sometimes been accused of being more empty words than real action, some of his critics seem to put much more weight in something he said once a decade ago than what he's actually done with the national spotlight and political power over the last several years.
It should be fairly clear that when it comes to health care financing, Obama is a Romney Republican.
