And it started as simply rebranded Romneycare (the 2006 MA state plan), so Rs should have found it palatable. And for the first half of Obama's first term, Ds could vote in anything they wanted but we still got a terrible version of a R health care plan.
FWIW, Nixoncare, totally blocked by Ted Kennedy because the dems didn't want Nixon's name on anything else that was nice (the Clean Air Act President kept claiming he'd end Johnson's war in Vietnam and then he had the gall to open relations with China!), was more like the single-payer health care Obama ran on but could not produce.
Also: Disclaimer, I'm absolutely not a conservative. I just don't like the liberal rewrites of actual history.
It's funny how Nixon definitely was a crook, and a loon, and should have gone to prison, and his paranoia and shenanigans set the pattern for and gave license to things to come, up to and including the current crisis... but he's still probably the best postwar Republican president, in terms of good things done or attempted.
Obamacare still has stood the test of time. Even in the face of the first Trump administration and both houses of congress being run by the GOP.
Despite promises to "repeal Obamacare" they never did repeal it... or even change it much at all. It was just too popular / the consequences too much to consider.
The joke at the time being that the Republicans would repeal Obamacare and replace it with the Affordable Care Act ;)
