Sorry if you're sick of politics, but there's a major point no one seems to be talking about...:

The tenth amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The National government has acted a LOT over the last 80 years in ways that were not necessarily delegated to them by the constitution.  That's ok though from a legal standpoint. They are allowed to make any welfare, healthcare, unemployment laws that they want.  They don't have the power to however, to enforce these laws if they are not backed up by the constitution.  That's up to the states and the people, respectively.

This means that individual states can opt out of these programs (depending on your interpretation of the amendment).  So, for example, if South Carolina (sorry, your past suggests you would be the state that would...) decided that they didn't want to participate in Social Security anymore, they could decide that their residents no longer have to pay or collect social security.  They could opt out all together.

Interestingly, Virginia has just passed a bill that would give its residents a choice to not participate in a national health care bill should it pass (which means they would pay no extra taxes towards the bill).

Personally, I believe that this is constitutional.  The national government does not have a constiutional power (by my interpretation) that says they can force any of these proposed health care bills IMO.  So it's up to the states to decide - or up to the people even! 

I'm very interested to see what happens if someone should right-out not pay their taxes that would go to health care under the interpretation that the national government does not have a constitutional power to tax them for such a program.  I'm sure it will happen.  I don't know if the supreme court will protect the people via the constitution's 10th amendment.  It would be VERY interesting though.