You can debate whether it was the right move; personally, I think it was, because I happen to think that the whole exercise was one of futility in that meaningful health care reform in the US can only come from options that would be politically impossible. The Republican Party would have tarnished itself by getting involved with the strange ACA provisions on a point by point basis and would have been electorally dead going forwards, without much help being done.
Meaningful health care reform in the US, to the extent that it might do something worthwhile would be politically impossible, because anything that trips over the two biggest stakeholders who currently are doing fine and constitute the majority (Medicare recipients and lower middle to upper middle class people with good employer provided health care) would be punished with the fire of a thousand suns at the polls.
The best options I see for health reform would be either:
A deep redistribution of Medicare from an old age only system to a public one for all that would obviously mean lower rates per capita but total coverage. I don't support this, but it could work. Of course you tick off and with good reason people about to go on Medicare or who are already on it. Obamacare did slight amounts of redistribution from Medicare (those "hands off my Medicare" signs actually were not stupid; there really was a costing mechanism change that was meant to help pay for Medicaid expansion, and you can see why that makes people angry), and the backlash was massive. The Democratic Party lost the 45-65 vote for good, I think, because of that, between 2008 and 2010.
Or, you could do Obamacare but with Swiss style mandates and price controls. The price controls would be popular on the left, although it might lead to overall lower quality in the long run. However, Swiss style mandates (which include imprisonment, wage garnishings, and really stiff penalties in general), while they would get rid of those who just ignore it and pay the fine or slip through the cracks, would be massive unpopular on both left and right. The right would see them as abridgments of personal liberty way worse than the individual
mandate. The left might agree to an extent, but they'd be way more worried about who would be punished punitively, which would almost undoubtedly be young people and minorities who would for various reasons be less likely to comply (because they lack social capital that makes compliance and civic engagement easier), and would be caught up being punished by a system supposed to help them. This system would make the exchanges probably end up working and enforcing cost discipline on providers in the long run, but it would be massively unpopular.
A full NHS system is not really an option for a Federal Republic like the US in my view, even if it was affordable (which it plainly isn't). And if you did this, it would run into insolvency issues quickly unless you were willing to tell all those middle class people to drop employer provided coverage and move onto state healthcare (which would be politically disastrous). Total free market solutions would perhaps lead to lower costs (assuming the deregulation gets rid of entrenched incumbent protections in US healthcare law, which is a laughable proposition and will never happen) but lead to higher rates of uninsured people and would be very unpopular.
