I mentioned elsewhere that, upon reflection, I think what the author meant to suggest is what you just said, which is that if you divest this particular bill from the situation, there should be no valid critiques against affordable health care. That I think almost everybody would agree with.

So then the question evolves into whether or not the Affordable Care Act actually meets that measure. We do not currently know, and only time will ultimately tell, but again, there are many very obvious arguments suggesting that it won't actually deliver affordable health care, or that even if it does, that cost is masked by all the other costs.

If, in an extremely hypothetical example, Americans went from paying 35% in income taxes in general to paying 75% in income taxes, but all health care were free, then it might have succeeded in making health care affordable, but at the expense of making everything else you might want to spend money on more expensive.

Anyway, just food for thought. It's obviously a very complicated issue, and one on which I can easily see both sides of the argument. I tend to be against the particular implementation for various reasons of cost and efficiency, but that doesn't mean that supporters of the Affordable Care Act have no valid arguments either.