Well, putting 'affordable' in the name was its own version of propaganda.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...
Obamacare is largely a success. Even the current CBO report shows that it has been working well. The program is only a few years old and needs some tweaking. Its main shortcoming is that it is slightly underfunded, and needs more enrollments from younger people. Also pretty shitty that 19 states would rather see their constituents suffer than to allow the federal government to expand Medicaid for them.
"a lot of its failures"
And yes, I think that if you're the counterparty and rally all your members to oppose anything that is put up for a vote then you absolutely share responsibility for what comes out.
Not least because by withholding your vote you forced them to find a vote elsewhere. So instead of your opinion, they had to cater to someone else's.
I don't necessarily blame Congressional Republicans for the choice. In the political calculus of a toxic and rabid media campaign to its base and primary challenges from the right, I understand why they did what they did.
But they still don't get a pass by saying "Oh, we voted against that. Therefore we have no responsibility for it."
A lot of the failures of the law I put on Republicans.
It's hard to fix something you aren't allowed to read, let alone introduce amendments to.[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU
EDIT: added Pelosi quote video link
Look up: Gang of Six affordable care act.
The HCR bill included 6 core planks of previous Republican health care bills, and the Democrats accepted and incorporated 161 amendments to the bill from Republicans.
http://www.salon.com/2010/02/23/hcr_amendments/ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/five_com...
The article you quote is from a month before the final version of the bill was even prepared (H.R. 3590), let alone submitted for vote.
Bills in progress mean nothing, especially to that Democrat leadership, who often used the gut-and-amend procedure to completely redo legislation on the fly, avoiding rules regarding which committee(s) a bill must traverse.
Want a real ACA do what most of the world did - take profit out of the healthcare business.
Put in a 5 year plan that insurers have to convert to non for profit orgs.
Single payer won't work in the US most of the world doesn't use it but has some sort of hybrid system. The common ground is that private providers are often non for profit or have to invest a substnetial percentage of their profit back into health services they provide for free or at highly discounted rates. And non for profit doesn't mean they can't make money it just means they don't pay dividends to shareholders and invest their profits back into healthcare.