There's an argument that the drafting and early implementation of the Affordable Care Act delayed the recovery. Employers weren't sure about what would be required in plans going forward and thus were less willing to hire people full-time because of this uncertainty.
What if the ACA had been more modest in its goals and provided more certainty to employers during the recovery? Perhaps a combination of
1) Medicaid Expansion
2) Individual Mandate + Middle Class subsidies up to 400% of the Federal Poverty Line
3) Employers being offered a tax credit for covering employees, rather than mandated to have plans they aren't sure what will cost
4) Young people being able to stay on their parents' plans until age 26
5) A few additional requirements for health insurance plans (contraception must be covered, etc).
6) A medicare buy-in for those at age 55
Could a more modest ACA have resulted in stronger job growth, more business support (due to the lack of employer mandate), some moderate GOP support (Bennett, Collins, Snowe, etc), and less or no Tea Party backlash?
Okay, you're in my area of professional knowledge. Everything you're saying except for #6 is, to some degree, part of the actual ACA.
The major coverage expansion components of the ACA were Medicaid Expansion and a subsidized individual market that is guaranteed issue and mostly community rated (tobacco, geography, age). In ARRA (the stimulus), the federal Medicaid matching rate increased significantly for legacy Medicaid as a means of keeping states from cutting their budgets too rapidly. States had reasonably strong balanced budget constraints that are pro-cyclical and Medicaid is counter-cyclical in enrollment eligibility so ARRA Medicaid bump was a fast way to get money to the states and increase demand.
Full up Medicaid expansion to 138% FPL at 100% Federal Match rate that started 6 months after the law was signed would have been a big deal especially once/if states figured out how to transform significant chunks of their standard Medicaid match rate population into enhanced match rate folks. Mechanically this is probably do-able if Congressional Dems were not worried about the CBO score.
#2, #3, #4 and #5 are basically what happened in the ACA. #3 almost no small employers have taken up the tax credits. Their is anecdotal tales of hour cuts and hiring deferred due to uncertainty, but on the macro scale, this story is not showing up in the data. Employers will hire when there is demand.
#6 is the most radical portion of your proposal. One of the fundamental liberal health policy goals for the past few decades has been to move more people to coverage regimes with administratively set prices. Medicare is the dominant policy universe with administratively set pricing. Provider groups have, are, and will go to war over moving people who are currently covered at significant multipliers of Medicare to Medicare-esque pricing. Provider groups were okay with moving the working poor (Medicaid Expansion) to Medicaid as most of this group was not covered or covered with high deductibles which meant a lot of bad debt. Medicaid pays a whole lot better than cash payments from people making near poverty wages. However, moving 55-64 year olds who earn between 138-1000% FPL to Medicare like pricing is a huge money loser for provider groups. This is a cohort highly likely to have commercial insurance AND highly likely to use a good chunk of services. A Medicare buy-in is a declaration of war against provider interests which probably sinks the ACA from passing.
Now going to another point --- the GOP had absolutely no interest in making a deal on healthcare. Their preferred policy is less subsidization of the sick (see AHCA, BCRA), less support for the old, and tax advantaged savings accounts that are nearly useless for the chronically ill and/or the bottom two thirds of the income distribution as either there is an equal inflow-outflow and thus no accumulation, or there is an inability to significantly fund HSAs build a significant cushion for a catastrophic year. Yes, Governor Romney saw the beta of Obamacare deployed in his state, but he was a Republican governor in a liberal state that had Democratic super-duper majorities in the Legislature. It was not his preferred health policy solution.