Unfortunately, its impossible to have universal private health insurance without a strong insurance mandate, for hopefully obvious reasons. People opposed to a mandate generally fall into 2 categories.
First, people that claim to support universal care but oppose a mandate, generally fall into the liberal category if instead of a mandate they'd like to substitute single payer or at least a public option or perhaps simply a government funded system paid out of general revenue.
Conservatives who oppose a mandate by definition are opposed to universal access, because absent a federally funded system, you can't have one without the other.
Which leads us to the question, what is the likely outcome of the muti-state attorneys general lawsuit that targets the mandate?
Sadly, my state, Florida, has Attorney General Bill McCollum, a major idiot himself, who wants to be first in line with the lawsuit. As if that wasn't enough, our state house committee already passed a resolution urging the lawsuit. Its the republican equivalent of a football pile-on, except our guy already has the touchdown.
Looney as it sounds, these lawsuits are not 100% without merit. The mandate is a somewhat novel and unexplored federal power, and its not completely out of the question that our right leaning supreme court might indeed toss out that part of the legislation.
What then? My quick read says that everything else in the legislation survives, and the wingnuts create a truly broken system. Absent the mandate, presumably most insurance companies would shortly go out of business, since it would be impossible to sell policies knowing you could not pay the claims. And without the mandate but with everyone guaranteed issue, most people including me would just cancel their policy and wait to get sick to buy it back.
And then... either the state or federal government would step in, and nationalize or bail out the insurance companies, and hilariously, the net effect of the republican attorneys general would be, to make the government the payer in all cases once and for all.
A win win if you ask me. Let the lawsuits proceed.