I think you can be disappointed Obama wasn't able to fix it. But blaming him for something that ultimately involves thousands of politicians and special interest groups is, I feel, unfair.
The answer is certainly not the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic party.
The existing policy is a compromise that liberals signed off on to improve the conditions of the worst off, but they were not able to create the kind of conceptually coherent total overhaul we would require to make the system rational.
I agree with you that blaming Obama for a failure of leadership in this situation is borderline absurd, but it's a simple narrative that is easy to regurgitate in a complex, frustrating world, so we have to forgive people for believing it, to some extent.
A one page bill could probably fix the whole thing
* move tax benefit of buying insurance from employer to employee (why is my company involved in my health insurance anyway?)
* allow buying of insurance across state lines
* require same price for all services, tests, medicines regardless of payer
* require those prices to be public
* declare a single 'pool' or market for insurance (just like federal employees have)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Afforda...
The bill passed in the Senate by 60-39 with all republicans voting against except for Jim Bunning who did not vote. With 58 Democrat and 2 Independent votes the Republicans weren't able to filibuster. After the bill passed the senate a special election to replace Ted Kennedy in the senate was won by a Republican, so the Democrats no longer had a super majority in the Senate, and so the decision was made that the house should pass the Senates bill as they didn't think voting on a house bill would pass the senate now that the Republicans had 41 votes which was enough to filibuster.
> The existing policy is a compromise that liberals signed off on to improve the conditions of the worst off
The only compromises happened between members of the Democrat party, between moderates and progressives.
> I agree with you that blaming Obama for a failure of leadership in this situation is borderline absurd
I agree that there are likely a lot of compromises that happened behind the scenes that we didn't see, but there has to be some ownership of that bill by President Obama. It was his marquee bill at a time when some Democrats were urging him not to tackle it, he had a super majority in the senate and the house. He signed it into law, he set the agenda, I think it's fair to hold him accountable for the outcome, even if it's not exactly what he wanted, it's still what was passed and if he didn't like it they could have scrapped it to try again.