Please explain to me how an exchange stood up by the government which enables you to find a private insurance company to purchase insurance from is involving the government in your use of the private insurance.

The new system acts as a facilitator for people to purchase insurance on an open "exchange" market. The government has as much to do with what happens afterwards as the NYSE has to do with how my 80 shares of Exxon perform. If the stock goes down, I can surely blame the Exxon board, or an oil spill.... but it certainly has nothing to do with the NYSE.

You should read about a law before you talk about it.

So the government has a monopoly over dolling out plan s on the exchange. In addition you need to be "cleared" by their system before you can get subsidies. Also there are subsidies, so they are directly paying for parts of healthcare. I mean before this I would call my insurence company and I would work with them for insurence. Now before I get insurence I or they need to interface with 30 government agencies to get information about me so I can be approved for a plan.

Then I can't even choose a plan I want since the goverment mandates levels of coverage.

Please take your blinders off your enabling your party to do horrible things.

Dude here in england where the government provides health care , it works out that private care is worse in standard (more fuckups personal experience with private cancer care vs nhs cancer care) and generally the public option runs trouble free , sure there will be teething problems on the first days of it opening but in 10 years time , you'll be wondering what kind of idiotic state ever decided to make it a private only system in the first place and what self depreciating lies you've had to swallow about freedom and open markets to get into this state.

Insurance is how you spell the word. Not insurence.

This is a Heritage Foundation plan from the 1990's. The Heritage Foundation is THE conservative think-tank in DC. It is extremely right-wing in its nature, which is why Bob Dole was for it, and Mitt Romney implemented it in Massachussetts. The only think liberal about Obamacare is its name.

As for "my party" I'm not a Democrat, and have voted for numerous conservative candidates. I find the current crop's anti-intellectualism and hatred of science to be repellent, so not so much these days. The fact that you assume that someone is a Democrat because they are correcting your ignorance on a government program's details is telling of your own partisanship.

The government mandates levels of coverage with car insurance. It works out well.

The purpose of mandated levels of coverage is to make sure that short sighted people don't buy a crappy minimum level of insurance, and then when they get something serious have bills that aren't covered. These high, un-covered bills go unpaid and are forced onto the rest of us through higher provider prices.

Sorry that it will take you five minutes longer to buy "insurence". In the meantime I will appreciate not seeing every hospital waiting room being used as a clinic for the uninsured workers of this country.

I feel really strange knowing more about US healthcare than people that have to use it.

The so called obamacare is mainly about access to healthcare. To the people that are left out. Also it is a Republican creation from the early 90s, when the people from the right were actually trying to devise policies rooted in reality with a chance to work.

What it does is actually increase the power of the free market by forcing everyone to trade their goods out in the open transparently.

There is no government control or rationing.

The affordable care act mandates people get health coverage, prevents denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions, provides centralized services to purchase health coverage, and expands federal programs for medicare and medicaid. Your local doctor isn't going to refuse to see you because they are still paid by an insurance company, and not the federal government.

>> "Also I am really looking forwards to the day I can't get my kid seen by a doctor because there was a budget fight and the government shut down."

Do you not think that doctors would be one of the essential personal not effected by a shutdown?

And do you seriously believe the US would completely ban private medical care? We have the NHS (free health care for everyone) but we also still have privatised care which you can choose to pay for if you want. It's 2013 and the US still doesn't provide free health care for its citizens. Pigs will fly before they not only do that, but ban private care.

Think how stupid both sides will look if actual deaths can be attributed to their political posturing over fiscal matters. E.g. "Little Jimmy died because he couldn't get essential treatment. How can you try to make that ok by saying that you were both playing chicken, but the 'other guy' should have backed down?"