Margaret Thatcher was finally undone in the UK by her insistence on attempting to finance local government expenditure with a poll tax. This proposal led to civil disobedience and mayhem because a poll tax is a deeply regressive tax: Everyone pays the same amount regardless of income.
In the US, the termPoll tax is according to Wikipedia more associated with taxes on voting but I'd like to suggest its actually very applicable to the mandates + fine with no PO construction thats apparently in the senate HCR bill.
The subsidies for those on lower incomes are not really large enough as they stand. But in the absence of meaningful restrictions on the insurance companies to raise rates, the profit maximizing act for insurance companies will be to raise the premiums on those policies/make them crappier in order to extract most of the subsidies themselves.
So, put simply, the choice people will have in this situation is:
Buy Junk Insurance or Pay the Poll Tax.
What happened in the UK after the imposition of the Poll Tax ? This quote is from the above referenced Wiki article.
The system was deeply unpopular. It seemed to shift the tax burden from rich to poor, as it was based on the number of people living in a house rather than its estimated price. Many tax rates set by local councils proved to be much higher than earlier predictions, leading to resentment even among people who had supported it. The tax in different boroughs differed dramatically because local taxes paid by businesses varied and grants by central government to local authorities sometimes varied capriciously.
There were mass protests, called by the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation to which the vast majority of local Anti Poll Tax Unions (APTUs) were affiliated. In Scotland the APTUs called for mass non-payment and these calls rapidly gathered widespread support which spread to England and Wales, even though non-payment meant that people could be prosecuted. In some areas, 30% of former ratepayers defaulted. While owner-occupiers were easy to tax, those who regularly changed accommodation were almost impossible to pursue if they chose not to pay. The cost of collecting the tax rose steeply while the returns from it fell. Enforcement measures became increasingly draconian, and unrest grew and culminated in a number of Poll Tax Riots. The most serious was in a protest at Trafalgar Square, London, on 31 March 1990, of more than 200,000 protesters. A Labour MP, Terry Fields, was jailed for 60 days for refusing to pay his poll tax.
Bear in mind that that version of the poll tax was applicable to everyone, this one only applies to those who don't have insurance or are in the less well-off part of the income distribution.
I don't think a poll tax is going to work any better here and now than it did there and then. So
Buy Junk Insurance or Pay the Poll Tax is not going to et us on a long-term path to better coverage, it'll discredit HCR and be reversed by either Republicans or us coming to our senses.