I think there might have been a way to provide universal care, but this wasn't it. Almost all major issues, including things like Social Security and Medicare were accomplished in at least a somewhat bipartisan way, with popular approval, and had a lot of people working together to get the law right. This was true even of terribly controversial things, like the Civil Rights acts of the 50s and 60s, which saw Republicans and Democrats working together on them.
This was totally partisan, and not only partisan, but because the Democratic leadership didn't even have the basic votes in their own party, it became completely corrupt -- so thoroughly corrupt that one US Senator, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, sold his vote for special treatment for Nebraskans, and saw his 60+ percent approval rating vanish in his own state. He is now considered unlikely to be re-elected, because his own constituents -- the people who would benefit from this corruption -- were so disgusted with what he'd done. Large portions of the American population also get special treatment under this bill, while others are disproportionately hurt (and not the wealthy.) If you have a negotiated plan set up as a part of a union contract, your health care insurance won't be affected. For you, nothing changes. You are simply out of the deal. But that means that the total number of people who have to pay more, to subsidize those who can't pay, is smaller, and so their rates will be even higher; further, those "gold-plated plans" retain their tax exempt status, so while the rest of us pay for medical insurance with after-tax dollars, the union plans, worth thousand and thousands of dollars, are not taxed at all. Those provision were Democratic concessions to their labor union supporters
I'm a Democrat, and even a liberal one, who has contributed substantial sums to Democratic candidates, but this whole thing stinks so badly, and pits so many interest groups against each other, that I'm ashamed of the party for doing it. There had to be a better way. The time for universal coverage may be here, but all Americans ought to be in it together -- there shouldn't be different classes of beneficiaries, depending on who bought or sold a vote to whom. I wanted a medical bill, but was praying that this one would be defeated, and that perhaps Mrs.Pelosi and her accomplices would be pushed out of their positions. We needed to start over, and try to preserve some semblance of fairness.
Now what? I think there's an excellent chance that the Republicans will get control of the House this fall, or if not, be so close as to be able to thwart the plans for actually operating this mess. I don't think they could repeal it -- there will be too many beneficiaries, even in Republican districts -- but what we could get is the worst of all worlds: a terribly corrupt, convoluted law that is further gummed up by Republican intransigence.
By the way, the people who use phrases like "a country as rich as this one," etc., simply have no idea of what this will cost. We are essentially talking about a takeover of about 1/5 of the American economy by the same people who set up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and made possible the enormous financial crash of the past few years (the bankers were the gamblers, all right, but it was Congress that built the casino.) And that stuff about the cost of the "war of choice" -- the cost of the "war of choice" is trivial beside the cost of this. America could run the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without noticing the cost, even though there are tens of billions of dollars involved. But the cost of the medical bill is so huge, that it *had* to be done right.
For people interested in finance, by the way, it should be noted the the bonds Warren Buffett just sold to pay for his acquisition of the Santa Fe railroad sold for interest rates *lower* than new US government bonds. That is seriously ominous -- that people would bet that the US is more likely to default than Warren Buffett.
I think in most ways, Canada did their medical system pretty well. They have some problems that could probably be alleviated by allowing private clinics and add-on insurance policies, but basically, even without those things, they did it pretty well. This is nothing like Canada.