Who Killed Obamacare?

Why did the ACA fail to win over a constituency commensurate with the impressive transformation it made in American healthcare provision? The very progressiveness of the ACA worked against it. Back in 2010 the ACA did something quite extraordinary. To pay for the exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion, the new law imposed a set of progressive taxes that represented the most consequential redistribution of income, from the top to the bottom, that Americans had seen since the Second World War. The revenue raised by those taxes helped pay for a dramatic expansion and improvement of Medicaid. But none of this made Obamacare a popular program in most of those red, rural, and white counties where the program had such a large impact.