Why Such A Visceral Reaction To The Health Care Law?

Why do so many Americans have such a visceral reaction against the new health care law? It seems to me like a bad law, poorly thought through and terrifyingly expensive, especially given our present deficits. But I’m thinking that even if it were not so expensive and were not such a Rube Goldberg chain of complexities, that many of us would still be angry about the thing.

Is it that a government-designed health care system makes us feel like wards of the state, dependent on the government for our health and thus our very lives? Many of us don’t begrudge welfare to the truly needy, but recoil at the thought of being on welfare ourselves. Does this new system put us, on some level, all on welfare?

Or is it that we don’t trust the government’s ability to run things effectively, and so are panicked at the thought that the government is now going to be in charge of our health?

Or is it that the health care law, perhaps coupled with the financial bailouts, represents a repudiation of all that free market, new morning in America policy associated with the Reagan Revolution? Are we perceiving this as a counter-revolution back to the welfare state ideology of LBJ and other Democratic social engineers?

Or what? I know you can say something like “all of the above,” but I would find it helpful to know not just what you are thinking but what you are feeling, down in your gut. I’m not looking for policy analysis but psychoanalysis. (Not that you are psychos. . . You know what I mean!) I would welcome hearing from tea partiers and also those of you who are all for the bill, whether this makes you feel better about America, or better about reversing the culture of conservatism that has reigned since Reagan, or whatever.