But for these Americans, that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that President Obama and his fellow Democrats promised a sweeping overhaul that would improve the nation’s health care system for everyone.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to go back and read President Obama’s big health care speech from September of 2009. He argued that reform was necessary not only to help the uninsured, but to help middle class Americans facing rising costs and coverage insecurities. The law, he said, would “provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance” and would slow the growth of health costs for families and businesses as well as for the government. Obamacare, in other words, was supposed to fix what most Americans felt was wrong with the health care system—not simply expand coverage to the uninsured.

That speech, and others like it, contributed to a sense that Obama, along with the rest of the Democratic party, was not merely attempting to reform a small segment of the health insurance market, but was instead taking responsibility for fixing the entire health care system. When Obamacare passed the next year, that’s essentially what the president and his party did.