Always nice to see people underrate Obama's first couple of years, which were some of the most active between Congress and the president in decades. People focus on what wasn't in the ACA and not what was actually in itand how it's fundamentally transformed how we even talk about health care.
I can speak from experience that the ACA was great going in between jobs two years ago as it covered me until my new insurance kicked in and was significantly cheaper than COBRA. I know people who couldn't even get insurance before the ACA became a law. There was a time where my work insurance went up big time because I missed the deadline for my biometric screening, but I was able to find something well within my price range on the exchange. And having insurance until I was 26 was and is completely underrated as I would have been paying for two additional years after graduating college, something I did not have to do for several years. That's years of expenses that people don't have to pay.
That doesn't even get into how different we talk about health care now. Dems in deep red Trump areas support the ACA; that's the minimum now. We were lucky to get any red-area Democrats to even vote for it in 2010; now it's something that's expected if you run. Reducing Medicaid? That takes a big fight; it's very popular due to the ACA. Pre-existing conditions and a longer period of time young people can be on their parents' health insurance? It's toxic to even go after those and reverse them. And now you have progressives going all the way, running on a Medicare-For-All platform. The conversation has changed completely due to the ACA.
The one thing I do think Obama should have done was attend some Occupy Wall Street protests in Wisconsin in 2011. They stayed out of it, and Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points in 2008. He won it again fairly easily, though not as lopsided, in 2012, but showing support for the workers getting screwed by conservative policies in 2011 would have went a ways to show that national Democrats support labor, something Hillary took for granted in 2016.