The real horror story is long term just like pretty much every large scale government program. Most of those who go through Obamacare will opt for Medicaid. However, at the same time, physicians are increasingly opting out of accepting Medicaid as they find they can't afford the government's repayment formula and delays. We're going to learn the hard way that health insurance doesn't equal health care.
In addition, people are taking high deductible health care plans. Just like subprime loans, this sounds great until people can't afford the payments. As the baby boomers retire en masse, this will build up in numbers affecting a large number of people at once.
There are still going to be many people who will choose not to buy insurance nor are they going to pay the penalty no matter how many bills the government sends. We have yet to see what happens with that. Are we going to criminalize not having health insurance?
These are just the tip of the unintentional consequences of Obamacare. The usual long run consequence of massive federal programs is to build up towards a large scale economic drop because the government is a very poor allocator of resources especially in the long run, it works in broad strokes often ignoring the needs of individuals, and it is too slow to micromanage such programs to adjust to changing environments.
