Et ça commence…
I am very lucky that I have good health insurance through my graduate school. In part, I entered graduate school because I needed that guarantee. I could not just drift from job to job without benefits. I would be spending $600 a month easily if I paid out of pocket for all of my live-saving medicine. (And I would die in about a week without it.) When I was a child and diagnosed with my disease, my dad had to stay at his job to keep our health insurance. It limited the whole course of his career because he could not afford to change jobs.
Let me tell you about a friend of mine. He is hard working and brilliant, but had to drop out of college to work to help support his parents. As a result of that, he is working long hours but never-quite-full-time in retail, so his employer does not have to give him benefits. He has asthma and epilepsy. Both conditions are getting worse because he cannot afford medicine or doctor’s visits. He borrows friends’ inhalers sometimes, but it is not enough. He knows that the epilepsy could kill him any day, and lives a very precarious and fatalistic life. Far too many people in the U.S. are in his position for us to call ourselves a First World country.
I agree with @janbb. No one seems to know how the health care reform will work out. But in my opinion, the Americans who disdain it simply because it is “socialist” or because it was created under a Democratic and slightly dark-skinned president, and who have never had to choose between medicine and food, or lost their house because of an unforeseen medical crisis, need to get their heads out of their asses and learn some empathy.