Like I said, removing the mandate makes the ACA worse, not better. It absolutely has It's flaws. Major flaws. There are things that can be done to improve the law and make it better for Americans, but instead of doing that, this is an effort to further sabotage the ACA and make it worse in hopes that it fails. If it does, who pays the price? What do you think the likelihood is that another bill is crafted to replace it? Next to none. We just saw that the Republicans can't get it done with both houses and the Presidency.
I would venture to guess that if you are buying insurance today through an exchange, whatever you got in tax savings was easily wiped out by the proportionate increase you will see in your insurance premium.
Responsible people who don't want to go without insurance are who this bill hurts. We can do better with healthcare. Way better. But we can't do better with the partisan politics we have in Washington today. This bill makes something bad even worse.
I definitely agree that both sides need to come together and work on an actual good solution. Unfortunately Washington has become so partisan that it’s impossible to get some long term solutions done on a lot of issues because career politicians on both sides are more interested in keeping their plush government gigs then actually deal with complex issues, so they settle for cheap short term solutions that cater to their base (such as attaching the mandate to this tax bill for the Republicans, or the Obama base refusing to acknowledge or address most of the shortcomings in Obamacare while they were in office). Also there’s plenty of corruption to go around when it comes to government, it’s not one-sided.
I’m not disagreeing with you that this was a stupid move or that people who still have insurance aren’t going to be suffering from this with price increases, but I also think it’s not being realistic to say that Obamacare is viable for a lot of families right now either. It’s crappy expensive insurance that 13 million people don’t want (and are sure as heck not saving $500-1000 a year) but are being forced to have.