Obama owns ACA. It was his big campaign promise, where he claimed he could do better than Hillary did, and after what was being worked out was starting to look like a big turkey, Obama was advised to drop it and try again later. Obama insisted that "no matter what" the health care legislation was going to get done before he did anything else. In 2014 David Axelrod was still giving interviews about Obama's insistence on pushing through what was turning out to be a terrible Rube Goldberg machine of a law through its last mile.

ACA was a big mess that any economist would agree would drive costs up because the incentive to escalate medical bills was baked into the 15% profit the money men in the middle are paid out. There are so many flaws in it there are too many to list here. These were obvious at the time.

It might have looked like it barely scraped through the due to the Blue Dog Democrats from the inside, because it was all worked out by Democrats, and House and Senate Republicans were excluded. But it worked out by, and only with, Democrats and rammed through everyone else's objections, including the Blue Dog Democrats who were trying to object. I don't think a single person who wasn't a Democrat voted for it. Except Bernie Sanders, who claims he helped work on it.

There was little debate outside the closed door meetings of Demorats and Pelosi famously declared that everyone will find out about it after it passed ("Pass health care reform so you can find out what's in it"). And after that, waves of Democrats were immediately voted out of office in the House on the next round of elections and later, the Senate.