Honestly, this whole universal healthcare thing was just a whole lot of new infrastructure that wasn't needed. There were a relatively small percentage of americans that didn't qualify for either medicare or medicaid (there are others, but to simplify things) and weren't on their own insurance and instead of trying to pass legislation providing healthcare for that specific demographic, the democrats went full white knight and introduced this whole mess of a bill called the Affordable Care Act (which is the same as Obamacare for those foreign forumites, or who are otherwise unaware.) Now, it's created such a debacle for people on whether to sign up or not and it's seriously impeding the ability of some doctors to effectively care for patients. Hell, many people decided they'd rather just pay the penalty fee for not being on the new AFA plans at all.
Not to mention that the health insurance market was a HUGE one that employed millions of people (we are a service based industry anyways) and is now in a bit of a rock and a hard place, and subsequently, on somewhat of a decline. No one in that business is happy AT ALL, and I can say that most of my family (both nucleic and extended) has had affordable healthcare for all or most of their lives before the AFA. Now, to put that in perspective, I am neither rich nor poor, so take it how you will.
Like I mentioned at the beginning of this, I truly do believe that congress would have one a better job if they had just dealt with the problem rather than creating a massive, blanket campaign for universal healthcare. A lot of people always say, "Oh, look how great it is in other countries like Canada!" to which I always reply, "Ya, look at the population size there. The logistics are significantly less of a burden on the bureaucracy." There are a slew of other problems, but i'm not really acquainted with the specifics of the bill well enough to discuss them. Also, recently we've been hearing less and less about the AFA. It's difficult to tell if that's just American media being cutthroat with their news cycles or if many of the problems have been fixed/became not-a-problems.
EDIT: @Baugsy: Wait, so is that article for or against Universal healthcare? Seems against it to me?