It was very effective messaging on the part of the Republicans, honestly. If you ask people about the ACA, or about the provisions inside of it, people tend to vote around 10-15 points more polarizingly for the ACA than Obamacare (ie: 10-15% more people oppose Obamacare versus the ACA, and 10-15% more people support Obamacare versus the ACA). In addition, people overwhelmingly support the provisions of the ACA, with the exception of the individual mandate (anywhere from 55% to 88% support).
Basically, the republicans have attempted to muddy the waters about what the law actually does in the hope that the confusion favors the status quo. They've put out tons of ads trying to convince seniors and people 18-35 that the healthcare law amounts to Uncle Sam snooping in their medical records (never mind that the plans available on the state-run exchanges are from private insurers) to gin up skepticism among the younger demographic in the hopes of torpedoing the whole thing. Unfortunately, that's been somewhat successful, as a large pool of healthy subscribers is a necessary thing to help pay for the financial risk of insuring the chronically ill (an unpopular opinion on my part, but true), and the worry is that if they don't get sufficient sign-ups from the young and uninsured, they won't be able to properly manage the program.
Of course, by pushing young, healthy people to avoid insurance, the GOP's really pushing people to let it ride on their luck, which is frankly reckless. I mean, hell, I'm a healthy 24 year old male with no pre-existing conditions, and without the $45 a month I pay in insurance premiums, I'd be on the hook for somewhere in the neighborhood of $8k in the last year alone ($500 bucks or so for an urgent care visit, $1.5k for a specialist referral to sports medicine, $2k for an MRI of my knee that I injured dancing and about $4k for a very pricey semi-medically necessary medication I take that requires monthly refills and occasional dose titrations). Instead, I paid a whopping $600. Still, not cheap, but paying $5/month for my meds instead of the $340/month it would otherwise cost is a huge savings on its own. And I'm relatively healthy, I have a friend who's 27 and needs a total hip replacement because his hip joint has completely wasted away in the last three months. If he didn't have the same insurance I had, he'd be fucked, plain and simple.
tl;dr: The GOP has been very effective at painting the ACA as an abomination. Frankly, it's disgusting that they're trying to prevent people from getting insured: it amounts to playing god with the livelihood and long-term health of their constituents.
