However, why it is unpopular with Republicans might be different from why it might be unpopular with Trump supporters, who are not always Republicans (Trump's greatest supporters were Democrats from small towns in the eastern US).
During the presidential campaign, the BBC interviewed Trump supporters in order to better understand the Trump phenomenon. The BBC reporters claimed that the single most voiced grievance Trump supporters had was with Obamacare. They would claim that the Act forced them to buy health insurance, which pushed them into financial insolvency (they were previously uninsured but not financially troubled), or they told stories about local businesses that had to lay off workers because of increased health insurance costs. The BBC reporters did not look into these complaints any further. (I cannot now find that story.)
I've read subsequent stories about how people tend to be exceedingly vague when they complain about how they or others suffered financially under Obamacare. Underlying their wariness of Obamacare, there seems to be a general resentment of being required to purchase health coverage, despite its benefits.
One other interpretation is that Trump supporters, while jealously guarding their entitlement programs like social security, perceive other programs as "giveaways" to corrupt liberals.
Knoxville, Iowa — One recent morning, I sat near two young men at a coffee shop here whom I’ve known since they were little boys. Now about 18, they pushed away from the table, and one said: “Let’s go to work. Let the liberals sleep in.” The other nodded.
They’re hard workers. As a kid, one washed dishes, took orders and swept the floor at a restaurant. Every summer, the other picked sweet corn by hand at dawn for a farm stand and for grocery stores, and then went to work all day on his parents’ farm. Now one is a welder, and the other is in his first year at a state university on an academic scholarship. They are conservative, believe in hard work, family, the military and cops, and they know that abortion and socialism are evil, that Jesus Christ is our savior, and that Donald J. Trump will be good for America.
They are part of a growing movement in rural America that immerses many young people in a culture — not just conservative news outlets but also home and church environments — that emphasizes contemporary conservative values. It views liberals as loathsome, misinformed and weak, even dangerous.
Along with the work ethic, there is among conservatives a starkly different view of human nature -- that human beings are not born good, but must work hard to become good.
“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good,” said Mr. Watts, who was in the area to campaign for Senator Rand Paul. “We are born bad,” he said and added that children did not need to be taught to behave badly — they are born knowing how to do that.“We teach them how to be good,” he said. “We become good by being reborn — born again.”He continued: “Democrats believe that we are born good, that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame when things go wrong — not us.”
Mr. Watts talked about the 2015 movie theater shooting in Lafayette, La., in which two people were killed. Mr. Watts said that Republicans knew that the gunman was a bad man, doing a bad thing. Democrats, he added, “would look for other causes — that the man was basically good, but that it was the guns, society or some other place where the blame lies and then they will want to control the guns, or something else — not the man.” Republicans, he said, don’t need to look anywhere else for the blame.
To some extent, this pessimistic attitudes reflects the "moral revolution" that was the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Earlier ancient societies -- the Romans, the ancient Greeks -- had ethical systems based on honor, but were devoid of moral considerations. The 'good life' for the Greeks in the "Iliad", for example, was the life of plunder (the more one plundered, the greater the honor one accrued). However, what conservatives may not perceive accurately is that liberal idealism likewise derives from Christian sentiments. Not all liberals are corrupt.
With this in mind, what might Trump's alternative to Obamacare look like?
It might be essentially identical to Obamacare, with a few cosmetic alterations.
Indiana's unique Medicaid expansion was designed to appeal to conservatives. HIP 2.0 asks covered people to make a small monthly payment to access health insurance. A missed payment can result in six-month lockout from insurance coverage. Those provisions aren't allowed under traditional Medicaid, but Indiana got a federal waiver to implement them.
