Oh, politicians...
When Machiavelli penned his treatise, The Prince, he was fairly universally questioned for his morality. The idea that a government sometimes had to do bad things and get its hands a little dirty in order to serve the best interests of the state wasn't necessarily new, but it certainly wasn't anything that anyone wanted to admit. In a Platonic-Christian philosophical outlook, the best ruler would be the philosopher-king -- the upstanding, selfless, good guy, who always chose the moral high ground and reaped the benefits of God's Providence. In reality, however, statecraft is often a game of compromise--both on policy and morality. Sometimes protecting the people might mean the king must lose his soul -- at least according to Machiavelli's viewpoint.
But Machiavelli was often misunderstood as somehow advocating tyranny. He didn't. He rather famously argues (as Cliff's Notes might reductively put it) that it is better to rule by love than by fear, but fear is far more efficient and reliable, and therefore the safer course.
Perhaps more importantly, however, he warned those who would wield fear to be careful of the kind of fear they wielded.
Killing people, Machiavelli felt, was one thing. Bump off some competitors early on, and people will easily forget...or, at the very least, they will get out of your way. Murders, assassinations, trials...those are fair game, especially early in a reign. Those whom you don't kill won't necessarily bear a grudge, and those whom you do kill can't do anything about it after the fact.
What a tyrant should never under any circumstances do, according to Machiavelli, is mess with people's stuff (including their women).
People won't necessarily revolt if you kill their neighbors -- what's it to them if you do?
People will, however, react passionately if you take their stuff or threaten to take their stuff.
What the Democrats are doing now is threatening to mess with people's stuff -- their health insurance and their money.
Nobody wants poor people to die from sickness (except for liberal Malthusians). It's one of the reasons why Americans are so generous to charitable organizations. But this is about the government taking money away from its citizens by compulsion. Ask me to give you ten bucks so you can buy tylenol, and I'll probably do it. Go into my wallet when I'm not looking and take the ten dollars, and I'll call you a thief.
It is a pretty basic aspect of human nature that more people are worried about protecting their own property than whether or not a stranger they've never met will or will not be able to get free medical treatment.
From the scads of newsclips I've seen, many Democrats can't believe that individual citizens could possibly be so impassioned about protecting their wealth -- these Democrats are convinced it must be part of some kind of Republican conspiracy. And yet if they spent more time reading their Machiavelli than their Marx, it would seem the most obvious thing in the world.
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