I agree 100%, but let me see if I can explain their view (which I disagree with) in a way that will make sense, or at least seem less crazy.

If you're an open-source participant, you may have experienced the power of what I've heard called adhocracy or do-ocracy. In it, we're all equal individuals; power is used situationally, in a bottom-up fashion, by those who are currently accomplishing something for the common good. In those contexts, top-down exercise of power feels very interfering.

The US's history includes a strong dose of that, plus a strong sense of individual liberty. Our country was born in rebellion to some far-away people who wanted to boss us around. Almost everybody here is descended from somebody who said, "Fuck this country; I'm outta here," and moved to America. One of our central civic documents, the Bill of Rights, basically lists all the things the federal government can't do. A giant chunk of our national mythos is bound up in westward expansion, where in a thinly populated frontier, the cowboy-hero did what he wanted and bowed to no man. Never mind that the era was short and the story more complicated; it's the idea that lives on.

Most of us who live in cities have long ago accepted the need for modest civic organization and collective action. We live too close to one another to be able to pretend that every man is an island. But even here, we tend to jealously guard our independence. Much more so in the suburbs and in rural America, where interdependence is harder to see.

Given all that, a demand that you buy health insurance can easily seem like (or be made to seem like) a crazy imposition from a far-off bureaucracy. Most other tax in the US is based on income, assets, or expenditures; if you aren't making/owning/spending anything, you don't have to pay. To some this feels like being dragged into participation in a society that they never particularly wanted to be part of.

All of that is intensified by several factors. A big one is the Republican party's strong shift rightward [1]. There is also a large segment on the right that has decided that the black guy with the funny name is not an American [2], making anything he does seem more like an imposition. Plus, there's a long tradition [3] of painting this as "us" (that is, white people) paying for "them" (black and brown people), even though the federal government actually shifts a lot of money from liberal states to conservative ones [4]. There are also strong streaks of anti-intellectualism and fundamentalist religion that play into this.

All that said, I agree it's kinda crazy when you take the bigger picture into account. America's health care system is a mess, costing way more than anybody else's, and leaving millions with little or no service. Something has to be done. This solution was actually a conservative one [5], and it's not like the American right has proposed anything better. It's not the solution I would have picked on my own, but given current American politics, I think it was the most achievable option.

Ok. That's more than you every wanted to know about America. Thanks for making it this far.

[1] http://voteview.com/images/polar_house_means.png
[2] e.g., http://www.ocregister.com/totalbuzz/obama-469434-http-href.h...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
[4] http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-f...
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordab...