There is an email/facebook message going around that makes light of The Affordable Healthcare Act by comparing it to what it might be like if Congress were to require an Affordable Boat Act that would require everyone in America to have a boat.

I think the Affordable Boat article is somewhat humorous but I think it was written, intentionally, to devalue the Affordable Health Care Act. I disagree with that depiction.
The reason it doesn't work is that we do not have a problem in our country with boats. The insurance companies of the United States had created a system of health care that was not working. The Health Care System that the Insurance Industry had created:
1. Resulted in the number one reason for bankruptcy, 64%, being that a person got sick. Over 50% of those people actually had insurance when they got sick but the insurance industry had developed a system in which they would drop expensive individuals or raise the rates of people who got sick beyond the patient’s ability to pay and a system where insurance companies would advise policy holders on how to fund raise, and put on benefit auctions, and benefit spaghetti feeds, to help pay for necessary care. That is the last thing that loved ones should be considering at that time. Sometimes they were raising money after their loved one had passed away!

2. Resulted in a system where policy holders were afraid to change jobs or make major advancements because they would be submitted to re-evaluation in which they were subject to being dropped from the policy they had been on, as their new job, or position, allowed the insurance company to declare that the policy holder now had developed a pre-existing condition.

3. Resulted in children being born who had pre-existing conditions. Insurance companies would refuse insurance policies for those children. If the necessary medicine was too expensive, the only option was for the child to live a life of poverty.

4. Resulted in a system in which everyone in America could get health care but the very poor were only allowed that option, after the fact, and by going to the most expensive means of obtaining healthcare in the world, the United States Emergency Room. This process ignored the cost savings that could be the result of doing a preventative health care delivery system.
5. Resulted in a situation where insurance companies could refuse adult children of policy holders insurance coverage because the insurance that those children had pre-existing conditions that they did not have to cover.

Not everyone in America needs to own, or ride in a boat. Everyone in America does require health care at some point. This happens, most often, as we approach the end of our lives. We do require every person who drives to be responsible for accidents that may result by requiring every driver to obtain automobile insurance. It is not a big leap to require every person, who will get sick at some point in their life, to be responsible for their own health insurance coverage.