I can see I'm totally in the minority here but think about this: the government has now mandated that we, as free citizens, are REQUIRED to purchase a product from the government or be penalized! In America! Seriously??
No. The bit where you went wrong was where you said "from the government".
It is mandated that we pay the
government for our police, our army, our navy, our firemen, our roads, our schools, our border control, and pretty much everything else that is considered a general public good.
But conservatives have got their filthy claws so deeply in the national back that apparently the nearest thing that we can do to health care reform involves mandating that we should pay, not the government, but private for-profit companies for our health care.
Yes, this is America. It's the only country so enslaved by conservative ideology that this sort of thing is even imaginable.