The other side of the Obamacare debate, that I had hinted that.

First, it was not a debate between health care for the uninsured and no health care for the uninsured. This is the fallacy of confusing a bill’s intended purpose with its actual outcome. At best, any bill may achieve its desired outcome.

The fact is, and we can all agree, Obamacare was a bad bill. It was full of carveouts, special-interest kickbacks, and logrolling crafted behind closed doors without any Republicans even allowed in the room. Heaven forfend anybody provide oversight. In actual policy it was essentially conservative in that it left and locked the nonsensical insurance system, and particularly the particularly American employment-linked system, in place, while adding a giant handout to help people afford it paid for with money we don’t have, while stopping short of socialized medicine, which would have been more cost-effective if we had ended up fully going that route. Obamacare is and was a monstrosity, and at best it may have had a good outcome.

The real fight over Obamacare was a bad bill versus no bill at all. In terms of morals, we Republicans did wrong when we chose to make a last stand before the midterms and go for no bill at all, when more sensibly a bad bill that at best may have good outcomes may end up better than no bill at all.

After all, we were badly in the minority and if we voted down the bill, it’s not like we would have had any input into its replacement anyway. Morally, the war was nihilistic nonsense.

But we were itching for a fight after a full term of being treated as less than spit on the pavement by a long-suffered minority party drunk with power after winning a wave election. So we fought. And it was actually good politics! We made the Democrats such arrogant hubristic brutes in pushing the damned thing through that we won both houses in the midterms and Obama emerged humbled (and wiser – 2010s Obama made much sounder policy than 2009-2010 Obama to the point where it became more than conceivable that I could vote for Hillary.)

Repeal and replace would have been my preferred outcome, but the thing has been the law of the land for 15 years now, it’s entrenched in federal law and policy, and we should just take the L and leave it alone already. It’s going to take comprehensive reform to fix. But fucking Trump can’t get over it. And since it is so tightly integrated into the public apparatus, you can’t just yank it out. And Trump has proposed to do just that in the “Big Beautiful Bill” by gutting the exchanges. It doesn’t work that way. Trump doesn’t care.

Obamacare was the first political war to be waged over Twitter and the poison immediately became apparent. If you disagreed with any part of the President’s agenda it was you didn’t want a black man to get a win. That got very old very fast. Impugning motives was a big thing. We hated black people, we were shills for the industry (when they were the ones crafting perma-Frankensurance), we were being exploited by our capitalist overlords, we hated poor people, you name it. The Tea Party right-wing bloggers and Glenn Beck got their start here and Rush Limbaugh was still king, so radicalized media discourse spread on both sides.