[m0llusk]

That misses a lot of context. The Affordable Care Act is considered by many to be an attempt to meet medical care needs with a market solution while most competing ideas go a completely different route such as Single Payer. It isn't just a patch to a system, but an attempt to fit some difficult constraints. Portraying extremely complex systems as simple may be the most common form of the first failing listed here.

[4RealFreedom]

What context was missing? You can argue that the ACA has benefits or the US system is complicated but I did not simplify anything. From the article "Intervention—by people or governments—should only be used when the benefits visibly outweigh the negatives." My argument was 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' and politicians do not worry about the consequences of their actions.

[m0llusk]

You are asking a question yet seem committed to ideas and political views already. here is an attempt to answer:

Through the Industrial Revolution medicine increased in scope and complexity and cost. By the 1970s people expected access to hospital care which was increasingly expensive to provide. Around the world most developed nations came up with some kind of universal insurance or single payer system to handle this. The US went with employer based care which limits who is covered and puts a burden on business.

Ongoing calls for universal basic care threatened market based care in the US, so Mitt Romney came up with a plan to provide universal care through government regulated insurance markets. Obama tried to bring this plan to a Federal level but was stopped by a complex array of social and political forces. As a notable example of what happened, Frank Luntz who often has interesting ideas to contribute to this day insists that the ACA was not an insurance program even though providing health care through private insurance was the central concept.

So now there are people who see the ACA as a compromised attempt to save market based insurance provided medical care and others who see it as some kind of strange intervention amounting to socialized medicine which oddly enough is exactly what it was designed to avoid. Where ACA was adopted it seems to be working reasonably well, and in Massachusetts where the original Romney plan was adopted everyone is insured and gets care through private insurance markets coordinated by the government.

The really big irony here is that by compromising ACA and then not even adopting it in some states it is increasingly likely that some kind of Single Payer system will end up being adopted at a Federal level. In this sense those who attempted political intervention have generated the most harmful possible result. That is the increasingly likely possibility that the existing system of providing health care in the US through insurance markets will be completely swept away instead of being reformed as Mitt Romney and Barack Obama advocated.

[4RealFreedom]

It seems like you're focused on the implementation of the ACA here. I used the ACA as an example of secondary consequences. My question of context was because that's literally what you said. I was wondering how context related to my post which I could have been more clear about. You seem to be saying that context is everything no matter the secondary consequences and go so far as to give more context. Many people characterized the ACA as a Trojan horse at the time. Was that it's purpose? That's maybe a more appropriate question to all this - why doesn't congress add purpose to bills? We need measurable benefits to weigh. By sidestepping that part of the process, it's a guessing game - all bills are just a mash of secondary consequences. That's convenient for politicians and political parties but not the people.