Yes, obamacare is trivially different from romneycare. It's villified for political reasons by the right but it's what their mutual benefactors wanted. (Continued inefficiency and profitability; upward wealth redistribution)

Just to underscore this, Lieberman represented Connecticut, which is home to some of the biggest insurance companies in the United States. Lieberman killed the public option in the ACA.

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02/16/16766/elimination...

Lieberman was (and is) certainly bought and sold by the insurance companies, but the lion's share of the blame for not having single payer - let alone a public option - lies squarely on Obama's shoulders. Obama's man in the Senate, Max Baucus, at Obama's direction, barred all single-payer and public option advocates from the conference rooms and negotiating table from the very beginning. Nancy Pelosi and Obama cajoled Dennis Kucinich into supporting the ACA in exchange for a promise that they would bring his single-payer bill to the floor for a vote, to at least put Congressman on the record. Obama brought Kucinich on Air Force one to make this promise. They lied. Kucinich never got his vote - Pelosi and Obama never allowed single payer to surface at all.

Lieberman is certainly worth of endless condementation, but trying to pretend Obama didn't do everything he could to kill single-payer and a public option in order to implement Romneycare is just wrong.

At a political level, the entire approach of "get to 60 votes then punch it through!" is all wrong. This sort of change in the social contract of 300 million-plus people requires more consensus and a more gradual change than that sort of move can provide.

The political situation and polarization of the country certainly got a lot worse when the ACA was passed and that is arguably the biggest political problem the U.S. has had since, affecting basically every policy decision the U.S. makes.

To bring it back to jobs without purpose, not wanting to quickly rearrange an entire sector of the economy is a completely cogent reason to oppose a change you would otherwise vote for if it were applied differently.

Isn't the 60 votes thing is more a reaction to the Gringich stated policy of obstruction before cooperation style politics - before that Democrats and GOP crossed party lines more often to pass legislation and did not vote in lock step, I definitely recall Reagan/Tip O'Neill worked together across party lines to pass legislation most recently. Also, because of the 1980's Byrd Rule that requires 60 votes on avoiding the filibuster in the Senate on bills that affect the budget in certain ways after reconciliation - it sometimes lets bills only need 50 like the GOP was trying for with their ACA rollback last session.

Now it seems rare, the Maginsky Act sanctions and the Iraq War powers are the only consensus votes that come to mind.

A lot of the animosity goes much further back than Gingrich. There were burned bridges during the Bork and Thomas hearings, for instance.