It sounds like the main beef from the right is with the "forced to pay" part. That includes paying taxes for things they don't think they'd use themselves. And for the taxes they do pay, the same people want to see as much of that money as possible go to privatization of prisons, schools, city management (Michigan), etc.
The government - through taxes - forces people to pay for things deemed by the people to be for the public good. Even if you don't have a kid in school, you're paying in to support the school. Conservatives don't understand the "common good" part paying taxes, and would make the same broccoli argument for any tax.
Progressives have no problem with the concept of taxation, as long as that money is being spent for the public good. We want the services we pay into to go to the people who need it - in the most direct and efficient way possible. We all use roads, we've all been to school at some point, and we will all need health care, if we don't already. Paying into a health CARE system has evident public good, as long as that care is administered in the most direct and efficient way possible.
Our beef is that we're forced to pay a middleman whose job it is to stand in the way of delivering care, and pinch profits off the top.
So if there were a Health CARE plan that were payed into by a fair tax system, the left (and most other people) wouldn't have a problem with it - the proof being that this is accepted practice in nearly every other civilized nation in the world. But conservatives would still be talking about broccoli, and it would sound as ridiculous to me then as it does now.
So we have to defend the concept of paying into something as critical to the public good as healthcare (not cars, not broccoli). And we can do that without having to love the whole private insurance aspect of it.
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