The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — or Obamacare — is obviously one of the most heated issues in Washington and for good reason. The representatives we send to Washington are there to represent our views and give the people a voice, and most people oppose the law and want it repealed. A recent CNN poll found that 57 percent of Americans opposed Obamacare.  
   Most Americans would also agree we need reforms in our healthcare system, but Obamacare is not the answer. A true market-based system of healthcare — what Obamacare claims to be — is incompatible with the foundation that Obamacare claims to embody.
   As a college student under Obamacare, you may benefit in the short-term because you are able to stay on your parents’ plan until the age of 26, but in the long-term Obamacare will hit you square in the pocketbook.
   The mandates both to consumers and insurers are going to cause the cost of both insurance and healthcare to rise. And normally, because we live in a country that has an economy based on a free-market and consumer choice, you would have the choice to pay the increasing costs or not. But with Obamacare the choice is not yours to make. You are required to purchase insurance, regardless of cost increases.
  And that’s the truly interesting contradiction within Obamacare. While it claims to be the ideal combination of government regulation and free market forces, it neglects a key part of consumer choice: the choice to refrain from participating. When you consider purchasing a product in the free market, you generally look for the best combination of quality and price. If none of the available options suit your needs, you may decide to wait and buy later or not buy at all. This gives you an out and makes the producers of the products fight to keep their products quality yet inexpensive.
  The difference with Obamacare is that there is no out. The effect of which is that the law restricts your ability to make decisions based on information such as price. While claiming to harness “consumer choice,” the law neglects the most important part of the concept — the consumer’s option to refrain from choosing at all.  
   Not to mention the entire program is run from a single government agency. The problems that Obamacare faced both in the initial roll out and during the continued implementation were not necessarily the fault of the people running it. A program this massive should be left to actual market forces and not a façade of consumer choice being manipulated by thousands of miles removed from you and your healthcare.
   The Obama administration begins to concede that the law faces more challenges than it initially thought it would. They have implemented delay after delay for the implementation of certain aspects of the law and continue to face problems with enrollment.
   In the past when the effective result of a law is something different than the desired result, we make changes. Just because it is current law doesn’t mean it has to be around forever. We should repeal the current law and implement more specific systemic reforms in place of the sweeping government overreach that is Obamacare.