Can you image if we all had to buy car insurance from a central service bureaucracy?
This appears to be a common misunderstanding, and I'm not sure why. Nobody is required to buy insurance from a central bureaucracy.
When Democrats originally pitched the single-payer idea that has been so effective in controlling costs in other countries, Republicans characterized it as a threat to the private insurance industry and so the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, instead proposed the Romneycare model of giving government subsidies to private insurers in exchange for expanding coverage. The individual mandate was the GOP counteroffer to the universal mandate, designed to encourage personal responsibility instead of government imposition.
If you have employer insurance, nothing changes for you under the new law. You have nothing to complain about.
If you don't have employer insurance, the government is going to pay you to buy private insurance from a private company. How much they pay you is dependent on how rich you are. If you are very very rich, they are not going to pay you at all and you are right back where you were before the law.
Everyone will still have the option of buying private insurance directly from insurance companies. There is no mandate to buy through the exchanges. The exchanges were established to help
market forces work more efficiently, to encourage price competition and allow comparison shopping. This is like a conservative wet dream for health insurance! Which is why Romney made it happen in his state when he was governor.
I totally don't get all the GOP hate for this law. Democrats totally caved on every negotiating point during the health care debate, eventually passing the GOP proposal in its entirety. The conservatives got everything they wanted out of health reform, but then it got labelled Obamacare and suddenly they had to oppose it.
Has the GOP really moved so far right in the past three years? From where I'm sitting, the conservative right so completely dominated the health care debate that the left adopted all of their talking points. The country moved so far to the right that current Democrats are taking credit for things that were GOP ideas three years ago. In order to maintain the illusion of partisianship, the GOP has had to abandon their own ideas and move even farther right, with the net result of the political center drifting farther and farther right over time.
Republicans have shut down the entire government precisely because it has adopted all of their own policies. It's very confusing to me.