I then made my opinion that Obamacare etc. were not moving us anywhere near UHC either. I said that, that was my uninformed opinion. Zoogs laid down a lot of information. I must note that this information I took with a grain of salt because I'm quite certain you didn't include many ugly parts of it, which is why I'm incredibly hesitant to take any political info I learn here as gospel.
I think where there's room for disagreement is whether Obamacare is the right way to go (or indeed, whether single payer will be good or bad for us). Or whether for example, it was implemented well or poorly. I have my opinions on that, but let's not get into all of it for now.
Where there isn't room for debate is where these things fall on the more/less government scale. This is the *entire* deal with the Trump comment.
ACA = substantially more government than before.
UHC = substantially more government than even that. It wouldn't be wrong to call this socialist. Good or bad word, you decide
AHCA = undoes a lot of the government involvement of the ACA. Again, good or bad word, good or bad ideas on the whole, you decide.
The last several elections (not just the presidential) have been pushed by the parties themselves as a referendum on this more/less? government-in-healthcare question. Both Trump and the Republican Party, in action, are clearly on the "less" side of this debate, and they've won. No sane GOP leader in the past twenty years would have been caught dead extolling the virtues of a UHC system, but that's what Trump did. The most Trump-friendly interpretation of this would be: "Nice solution everybody else has, but we're going to reinvent the wheel and get there our [notably opposite] way."