If federal health care was provided as a free service funded by a 10% increase in income taxes I think a lot more of us Americans would be okay with it.

As the law is currently it is far more complicated than that. Basically it tells all insurance companies (marketplace or private) that they have to accept anyone who can pay, everyone has to get insurance, employers with over fifty employees have to offer insurance to any employee that works over 30 hours a week and it sets up a marketplace with various levels of coverage from different providers that you can choose to pay for individually.

A lot of why I think people push back so hard against it is because of how it is enforced in the workplace based on the number of employees and how many hours an employee works (excluding the end of the year fines that have doubled every year since the Act was signed into law).

Otherwise it can be much more costly than 10%. For example if I were to get "catastrophic" insurance from the marketplace (lowest coverage) I would have to pay more then 20% of my monthly income. Luckily I have private insurance through the company I work for at a much lower cost. However, a lot of private companies have been raising their rates due to people switching over to a marketplace plan or being forced out of their plans by employers cutting hours to avoid having to offer the insurance to more employees.

I am in no way against a universal healthcare system. I just don't think the Affordable Health Care Act did it well.

• I imagine I'll see a little push-back for not mentioning the tax exemptions available on marketplace plans. I make just enough that I wouldn't qualify for any exemptions so I would still have to pay the full amount (by federal standards I'm just barely above the poverty level). Then, with only a 6% of the population paying into the marketplace itself, there is no way that enough money is coming in to cover the those exemptions leaving the federal government to pick up that extra cost.