¶ … Republican stance on the Affordable Care Act has been decisively antagonistic and contrarian, and was machinated to address the main problem with the ACA, which is that it was authored by Obama. Likewise, Republican hostility toward the ACA represented the conservative platform's ignorance of the issues and the reasons underlying the ACA in the first place. The ACA was a step forward in creating a more progressive United States in which healthcare would be seen as a basic human right, and in fact did not go far enough in driving down healthcare costs. Instead of suggesting a new policy that would improve upon the ACA by restructuring the way insurance and privatized healthcare works, the Republicans introduced a bill that quickly died. Specific problems the Republicans identified in the Affordable Care Act center on paranoia over federalism, what the Republicans call "federal entitlement," and the perceived pitfall of mandating that all Americans have health insurance (Goldstein, DeBonix & Snell, 2017). The most inflammatory language used to decry the ACA include Sean Spicer's comment, "Obamacare has proven to be a disaster with fewer options, inferior care, and skyrocketing costs that are crushing small business and families across America," (Fox & Walsh, 2017, p. 1). The Republicans decried the mandated insurance principle and that employers had to offer insurance to their employees. Similarly, ideology-driven...

Republicans were also uncomfortable with providing help to disadvantaged clients, fearing a means-based subsidy program might be too compassionate (Goldstein, DeBonix & Snell, 2017). The Republicans also recognized that millions of people had accessed and used Obamacare subsidies, which made the ACA a success and thus a thorn in the side of the Republicans (Holan, 2017).
There are several fundamental provisions of the Republican proposal including eliminating the insurance requirement. The ACA would fine people for not having insurance and companies would also be fined, something that the Republican proposal suggested to replace with a different kind of penalty (Holan, 2017). In fact, a main feature of the Republican proposal was to release the mandate for health insurance, yet simultaneously place the onus on the individual with a 30% surcharge on any insurance client who has a lapse between payments (Fox & Walsh, 2017). Similarly, replacing the federal insurance subsidies that were the cornerstone of the ACA with a scheme involving tax credits plus grants to the states. How those healthcare financing mechanisms would improve the fiscal outcomes of the ACA was not clarified in the text of the Republican bill, which was…