[antisthenes]

Democrats have their own corporate patrons, like the healthcare companies.

They were just as happy to sell you out when they voted for the ACA (which is working for now, but will eventually fuck over a lot of middle class Americans who aren't getting insurance through their employer).

[geofft]

The ACA was based on a 1989 Republican-backed proposal and on Massachusetts' Republican-backed health care law ("Romneycare"), designed to be a more corporate-friendly version of a single-payer plan that accomplishes many of the same goals. Obama adopted it in order to get bipartisan support, not because he had any impression the individual mandate was good for individuals.

Any narrative that the Democrats have health insurers as their patrons and Republicans do not needs to account for facts of history like this one:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Ref...

(The argument that both parties would have loved the individual mandate, and merely fought over it for political points as a show for voters, is at least consistent with objective history.)