This is why I think even if you are in favor of socialized health care, you really ought to be against the PPAFA. It's not "socialized health care", the glorious ideal you have in your head where everybody takes care of everybody and it's all smiles everywhere. It's an ungodly abomination of a thousand pages of hastily thrown together legislation with a bajillion moving parts, dozens of newly created agencies, what is basically gibberish in terms of who is paying for what driven more by what voters needed to hear than any resemblance to reality, and then after all of that, was brutally beaten by the legislative process until it could barely assemble a coalition to drag it across the finish line in a horrifically compromised state.
Trying to explain why this is a good idea and trying to explain why socialized health care is a good idea are two things that should not be done at the same time. If you think it's bizarre how many people aren't buying into the whole nothing-but-smiles theme now, wait until after a few years of experience with this turd.
The whole "Oh, the monstrous heartless conservatives just want to throw granny over the cliff so they can save a buck" is just a propaganda smokescreen put up so you don't look too much at the actual product you're pitching beyond the catchphrase level. Personally I feel some people are being pretty careless about what will actually happen to real people while they are moving abstract political footballs labelled "socialized healthcare" around without caring what's behind the abstraction. I know the abstract progress may feel good today, but the reality isn't going to stay behind the abstraction boundary.
I don't really support the outcome (I want real socialized healthcare), but as far as I can tell PPACA is at least better than the status quo. It seems like it'll make it possible to buy individual health insurance, which will actually cover healthcare, and won't be jacked up when you get sick. That's at least one improvement over the current system, which is completely broken unless you're in a quasi-socialized health-coverage pool, like those provided by large corporations' group plans.
The US federal government spent more on healthcare last year than the UK government did, despite the fact that federal programs in the US cover 27.8% of the population compared to 100% coverage by the NHS in the UK.
To add insult to injury, we do not pay substantially less taxes than, say, Canadians. If we paid Costa Rican taxes I'd be fine with it, but we don't.