Are you 30 years old or younger and in good health?
If you answered yes, congratulations, the future of Obamacare depends on you. If you buy insurance, premiums shouldn't rise too much overall, and the system should work. But if you don't, premiums could spike and create a "death spiral." That would be bad.
How bad? Well, bad enough to destroy the individual insurance market—which would destroy reform. See, our healthcare system is really four different systems that range from efficient, to not-efficient, to non-existent. There's a government system for the old, poor, military, veterans, and some children. Or, as you might know them better, Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, the Veteran's Health Administration, and the Children's Health Insurance Program. A subsidized system for people who get insurance through work. An individual system for young, healthy people who don't get government or employer-provided insurance. And effectively no system for sick or older people on the individual market. Taken together, this patchwork system is a mess that costs us more as a share of GDP than any other rich country, without even covering everybody like they do. The question then is how we can stop paying more for less.
The answer, both sides agree, is ending the inefficient employer-based system. In a perfect liberal world, we would eliminate the subsidized system and move everyone to a government one—single-payer health care. And in a perfect conservative world, we would eliminate the employer-based subsidized system and move to an individual-based subsidized system that would compete with the government one. But, of course, we don't live in anybody's perfect world. So, even though conservatives refused to negotiate back in 2009, we got a compromise—Obamacare.