I am going to give you my personal look at Obamacare from a perspective which may seem a bit strange but in reality it should be alarming.  The interesting thing is that most of all of my childhood I went without even some of the basic things people assume most everyone has.   The only healthcare I had as a child was Medi-cal...which is the program upon which Obamacare was designed.  
 
My father worked several part-time jobs as well as his full-time job as a Baptist minister.  He did everything possible to provide for us, worked his fingers to the bone and still managed to comfort the people in our church and help them deal with their own problems.  Not once did any congregation we served bother to possibly consider that making sure the minister and his family had any healthcare or even some of the basic necessities in life was one of their priorities. They did however call at any time of the day or night for his help and he was there for them. 
 
Sometimes our whole family was there for them.  I was a very experienced babysitter, cook, and housekeeper before I was even 11.  This is not bitterness I speak from---it is my attempt at revealing to you that many who are among the uninsured are hardworking people often working in service-oriented positions which simply aren't offered healthcare.
 
So....let me get back to Medi-cal......the mentor of Obamacare.  When I hear people on the Obamacare bandwagon I think they probably don't really understand what they are supporting.   Many have never been on medi-cal.
 
My first visit to a dentist occurred when I was in high school.   Why not before high school?  Because up until that time Medi-cal didn't offer dental.   My parents made us all appointments and we all went.   The building was in the poorest part of town.  I remember vividly that  it smelled vaguely of mold.  They had us fill out a handful of forms and stuck our Medi-cal stickers on them.   My mother voiced relief that we were able to go get our check-ups, perhaps a little from guilt knowing we'd never had one before.  I am sure many parents have felt that pang of guilt when they couldn't give their child everything they needed.
 
My family was taken into different exam rooms,doors were shut, and we each faced Dentists that neither understood nor spoke English and neither did their assistants.  None of us were given any pain relief (I remember a lot of screams and they weren't just mine) while one sister had two teeth pulled, my brother had a root canal, and I had the portion of gums between each tooth removed. My mother's face was snow white as we were one-by-one paraded into the waiting room, bloody, terrified, and weak.  We were not given any prescriptions to prevent infection nor any pain medications. None of us ever went back.  I suppose you know why.
 
At age 14 in my first year in high school I wanted to try out for the cross-country team so I needed a physical.  My mother took me into the only Medi-cal doctor in our small city in California to get a physical.  He was as old as dirt.  Seriously, they probably pulled him our of a retirement home and placed a white coat on him.   He checked my reflexes and then asked me point blank if I had ever had sex and then warned me that women get lock-jaw from abortions and then they die.  For the next hour I sat there as he told me about women dying on the trail "back in the old days" when moving west in wagon trains.  He warned me that people died from childbirth just as they did from STD's. 
 
Well...after that little bit of weird I was nervous.  He sent the nurse in to Xray my legs.  She pulled out an ancient machine from a closet, pulled over a big plate for me to put my legs on and then held up a lead apron for herself and took the xray.  (Years later when I became an xray tech I discovered that machine had been pulled off the market 5 years prior to my xray because of radiation leakage and gee....apparently she didn't think a patient needed a lead shield)  But wait....that is not all.  She left and came back with a bottle of iodine, told me to open my mouth, and then she swabbed my throat with iodine.  I gagged and threw up.   They sent me out to the waiting room with my signed physical paper.  I never went out for another sport in high school....I don't suppose you know why. 
 
 
Now my next trip to the Dr was an interesting one.  I had spent the remainder of my high school years doing anything which did not require a physical but as bad-luck would have it my friends and I during my senior year enjoyed their back yard hot tub and got a nice UTI as a result.  I was NOT going to go back to that quack old fart who took Medi-cal.  I saved my lunch money and went to a regular doctor.  I went into the appointment and asked for the office manager as I knew I didn't have enough money.  She listened as I told her I was sure I was very sick, had medi-cal and some cash, and would be prepared to pay payments if I had to. The nice lady smiled and said she'd take whatever cash I had and my medi-cal sticker.  There would be no need to make payments.
 
So...did I suddenly get better care because I was able to toss in some cash with that medi-cal sticker?  It was not until many years later that I was to discover that the care I received that day was not only inappropriate but essentially fraudulent as well.  The exam and miserable things they put me through were to simply pad the bill to medi-cal.  I was an impressionable young woman blindly trusting a physician and his staff who gave me my first pelvic exam.  They didn't even explain what was happening to me.  After that invasion, they catheterized me to get a urine sample.  What should have been a simple exam and then a simple donation of a urine sample for them to test....became a nightmare which haunted me for years.  I was humiliated, abused, and taken advantage of.
 
Many years later after I became a health care professional I saw the difference in care those with medi-cal received from those who had other forms of insurance or even better, cash.  I began to see medi-care abuse from another perspective.  After leaving the military my first job in the civilian sector was for a small medical group.  They had me record the exams on tape, I logged the patients into a log, took their medi-cal information, and helped with the billing.  It was not long before I realized that they were recording over prior patient studies (against the law) and triple billing for every medi-cal patient.  Approaching them with my concerns they fired me.  Two days later after I reported them, the health department had closed them down.
 
Now this may seem a few really sad stories which you may think I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be a part of, but this is often more a reality than any of you'd like to think.  Obamacare will not "give" people much better care than they already have.  It may give those who have nothing at least something but mostly, it will compromise everyone's care.   I would like to hope that what I experienced is not still happening today but I know otherwise.  Those that abuse the system simply get better at it.
 
Physicians are just like any other people.  I have worked with some of the most ethical and devoted as well as the shadiest of characters who took every opportunity to "stick it" to someone.   The doctors that I know who are dedicated to the best healthcare possible constantly are faced with cutting something somewhere and they face a losing battle for reimbursement for all the services they provide.  Obamacare will simply place another series of webs which will come between a physician and reimbursement.  This directly effects patient care.
 
Ultimately I believe that YES we do need something in place to "manage" heathcare but I don't think the answer is the Obamacare legislation nor any of the other quick fix bills they are trying so hard to push through.  When you build something with a base---a foundation---which is Medi-cal, you are working with something already broken, twisted, and a royal failure.  None of these pieces of legislation are the answers.   This is the time we step back, look at the situation from another perspective, and work with something new.
 
I believe changing the insurance companies by removing the borders in which they have built monopolies within, and making some extensive changes in tort reform is a more prudent answer.  Seriously...these are smaller steps compared to the giant band-aid which Obamacare or any of the other bills presented today are....but the results would be huge.  It is however highly unpopular for the many companies who are padding the backsides of a lot of people who are voting on legislation, of which many are attorneys.
 
So I ask you---Why not make some small steps and see what happens then before we decide to sentence us all to something which has already demonstrated itself to be a gigantic failure?     Anyone up for having their throat scrubbed with iodine for no particular reason?   How about some unnecessary procedure?  More importantly, what is going to happen when you need a procedure right now but all the paperwork in the Obamacare initiative just hasn't been completed...or worse...that gatekeeper for his plan just does not think you are a good risk? 
 
There is still time to make your voice be heard.  I encourage you to take that voice and use it.....use it now to prevent a horrible mistake in our healthcare here in America.  It is better than waiting and screaming later....to people who simply will not care.
 
Obamacare is simply Medi-cal in plain-wrap.   I am fairly certain each individual is going to need healthcare which is not a one-size fits-all plain-wrap solution.