From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbarrow. This is The Daily.

Today, the individual mandate started as a Republican idea for fixing healthcare,

but became the heart of a Democratic president's biggest achievement.

Now, Congress is using the tax bill to kill it.

Why Republicans turned on their own big idea and what it means for the future of the Affordable Care Act?

It's Wednesday, December 20.

So, it was the early 1990s and Bill Clinton had just been elected president.

I feel so strongly about this. All of our efforts to strengthen the economy will fail.

And one of the first things that he did...

Unless we also take this year, not next year, not five years from now, but this year, bold steps to reform our healthcare system.

Is he decided that he really wanted to tackle healthcare reform?

Margot Sanger-Cats covers healthcare for the times.

And somewhat unexpectedly, he put his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in charge of the effort.

And she developed a very detailed proposal that would have really made major changes across the whole healthcare system.

What we are trying to do is not just to take care of those people who get up every day and go to work,

but they don't make quite enough money to be able to afford insurance and their employers don't help them. They are uninsured.

It was not very well received by Republicans, and it was also not well received by the healthcare industry and the insurance industry,

which were really freaked out by the idea that the government was going to get so involved with their business.

So there was this huge backlash.

And in the midst of this backlash, a lot of Republicans seized on a different idea about how to reform healthcare.

Let the free market decide what kind of healthcare we're going to have instead of the government.

And so what is the conservative market-based vision that Republicans come up with at this moment?

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