Why should I be forced to buy health insurance?

If you are young enough and healthy enough to be asking questions about why to carry health insurance, you are actually young, healthy AND lucky AND stupid AND selfish.

At some point in the next 20 years this country's voters will wake up to the simple mathematics underlying large and diverse risk pooling and will force dirtbag politicians to enact universal healthcare. It is the only rational way to move forward for all of us.

The whole damn sh-t house will be going up in flames on the so-called healthcare / health insurance.

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231983

theslinger wrote:

It makes perfect sense, but it can never happen because it is viewed as discriminatory. I would love to have a health care plan that doesn't cover hepatitis B, C or D or HIV, as those are diseases that are extremely expensive to treat and are completely avoidable by simple lifestyle choices (but that is discriminatory against IV drug users and people who engage in anal sex).

is that why only religious groups use it? i'm only seeing christian denominations apply it as an exemption. seems like a savvy alternative. i'm considering it

Young and healthy wrote:

I am healthy and don't want insurance. I am paying for health costs of the elderly and sick.

Also, I drive safely and never had an accident, why am I forced to buy car insurance for those who get into accidents.

Same thing with fire insurance.

And school taxes.......I have no kids. Those with kids should pay.

You are only required to buy car insurance if you 1) own a car and 2) drive it on public roads. Car insurance covers you in case someone hits you as well. No matter how safely you drive you can still be in an accident. (Yes you could sue, but that is expensive and what if the person has nothing?)

If you own the car outright, you can get very cheap insurance.

If you own your house outright, I do not think you have to have fire insurance.

School taxes: to some extent we have agreed as a society that education is important and it benefits all of use to have a good education system. Now the education system might have problems, and if you can convince enough people to eliminate government funded education then we can do away it.

I agree on the health insurance and SCOTUS should have as well. As long as your lack of health does not end up impacting me

The hard truth is that insurance whether governmental or private, can't possibly cover everybody for every thing.

Medical tech. Has grown the never ending possibilities.

luv2run wrote:

I agree on the health insurance and SCOTUS should have as well. As long as your lack of health does not end up impacting me

But you never know when someone's lack of health will end up impacting you. The OP is young and healthy but if he gets run over by a bus or some such thing he could require extensive and expensive medical care and that may require public money if he's uninsured, not wealthy, unable to work, etc. Yes, that's unlikely but it's possible.

Whiite Trash wrote:

If you are young enough and healthy enough to be asking questions about why to carry health insurance, you are actually young, healthy AND lucky AND stupid AND selfish.

At some point in the next 20 years this country's voters will wake up to the simple mathematics underlying large and diverse risk pooling and will force dirtbag politicians to enact universal healthcare. It is the only rational way to move forward for all of us.

If you are ok with forcing me to pay for other people's health insurance, why aren't you ok with forcing people with risky lifestyles to stop doing risky things??? This is what I don't like about many Democrat and liberal policies. They never want to assign blame and responsibility to people. It's always someone else's fault and that someone else should have to enable the risky behavior to continue by paying for it in taxes.

Why can't you at least try to meet halfway and force these people to stop doing risky things? You are selfish. That is why.

You can't stop people from doing risky things. Almost anything you do carries some risk. Are you going to stop people from driving? You want to stop people from smoking and drinking? We went that route with Prohibition and it went badly.

To some extent we do try to eliminate risky behaviors. Most states require people in cars to use seatbelts. There are health warnings on cigarette packs and alcoholic beverages. It's hard to get a kid into school without vaccinations. You can't take all that much risk out of life.

I don't want to pay for the Jackass type guys who do stupid stuff to hurt themselves, and their followers

OP, if you don't want to buy health insurance, then you don't deserve any other protections as a citizen. You don't really need police, fire depts, any doctors, or laws. You're always free to leave the country.

Using the word "insurance" to describe our current system for sharing health care expenses is very misleading. Other misapplied terms like "risk pooling" further obfuscate our system.

Insurance is the opposite of a lottery. In a lottery, I pay $1.10 for a 1/100 chance of winning $100. The odds are "fair" - I pay $1 for a 1/100 chance of winning, plus 5 cents to cover the lottery company's cost and another 5 cents for their profits. True insurance like car insurance, homeowners insurance, etc. work in a very similar way. I might pay $110 a year to insure my car because I have a 1/100 chance of incurring $10,000 of damage in any given year. Again, I have to pay $10 extra to cover the insurance company's costs and their profits, but the arrangement is "fair": if 100 people just like me (same car, same driving patterns, same location, etc.) bought the insurance, the total premiums paid would equal the damage to our cars, plus overhead. Note that car insurance companies make every effort possible to try to determine the exact probability that you specifically will get into an accident, and will charge you a premium that reflects your individual risk. The insurance company charges you according to your risk - we use them because we prefer the certainty of a small expense to a low probability of a big expense. The insurance company provides this service by pooling our specific risk across a large population with predictable expenses in aggregate.

Health "insurance" today has very little in common with real insurance. The total health care expenses of a 100 young healthy people come nowhere close to the premiums they will have paid. A young healthy persons premium reflects a very small amount of insurance (the probability that they will incur medical expenses that year above their deductible) plus a very large wealth transfer to folks who are older, less healthy and less wealthy. This "insurance" is just a tax by another name.

[quote]HRE wrote:

You can't stop people from doing risky things. Almost anything you do carries some risk. Are you going to stop people from driving? You want to stop people from smoking and drinking? We went that route with Prohibition and it went badly.

What are you talking about???

Yes of course you can stop people from doing risky things. I don't care if they do risky things, but if they want me to pay for their insurance, then why can't they be periodically risk tested? If you smoke, no subsidized insurance. If you use drugs, no subsidized insurance. It is that easy.

Prohibition was a huge success. Its goal was reached (significantly lowering alcohol deaths and harms). Prohibition was ended because politicians manipulated peoples' vices and said "vote for me and I'll end prohibition".

HRE wrote:

You can't stop people from doing risky things. Almost anything you do carries some risk. Are you going to stop people from driving? You want to stop people from smoking and drinking? We went that route with Prohibition and it went badly.

What are you talking about???

Yes of course you can stop people from doing risky things. I don't care if they do risky things, but if they want me to pay for their insurance, then why can't they be periodically risk tested? If you smoke, no subsidized insurance. If you use drugs, no subsidized insurance. It is that easy.

Prohibition was a huge success. Its goal was reached (significantly lowering alcohol deaths and harms). Prohibition was ended because politicians manipulated peoples' vices and said "vote for me and I'll end prohibition".

Because most grown ups, wether left or right of the political center, understand that living in a civilization entails material costs. Can you guarantee you will always be able to lay out the cash for all your needs? Do you have any understanding of the infrastructure from which you benefit on a daily basis? Do you have enough cash on hand to compensate the family you maim if you have a seizure and cause a fatal car crash? Can you pay for a long term care facility if you have a massive stroke? Have you ever visited a country without a proper sewer system and no emergency services? You don't live in a bubble. A generation ago Republicans and Democrats agreed about the essential costs of having a stable country, and some still do.

Hargretmoolahan wrote:

Because most grown ups, wether left or right of the political center, understand that living in a civilization entails material costs. Can you guarantee you will always be able to lay out the cash for all your needs? Do you have any understanding of the infrastructure from which you benefit on a daily basis? Do you have enough cash on hand to compensate the family you maim if you have a seizure and cause a fatal car crash? Can you pay for a long term care facility if you have a massive stroke? Have you ever visited a country without a proper sewer system and no emergency services? You don't live in a bubble. A generation ago Republicans and Democrats agreed about the essential costs of having a stable country, and some still do.

None of that addresses why people should be able to get subsized care for their voluntary risky behaviors. I understand the general idea of taxes. I don't understand why no responsibility is put on people doing the risky behavior.

I was addressing the original post. What risky behavior are you referring to? The original post made reference to ordinary activities such as driving a car. My some measures that is a risky activity, one where even very cautious folks like me carry the risk of causing terrible damage. I am all for spiking the insurance costs for multiple driving infractions if that is what you mean. Or perhaps you mean risky behavior like eating poorly, or hang gliding, or smoking? For sure, the aggregation of insurance could be reinterpreted in many ways based on behavior patterns, but that does run the risk of empowering businesses and government to make decisions many people on the left and right would prefer to make for themselves. It is complicated, but I still contend that the balance of reasonable people concur that the greater good is served by aggregating the costs associated with living in a developed nation. Only a very tiny percentage of Americans can afford to live secure lives and pay in cash for every eventuality. I doubt you or I can.

Driving is not like smoking. You are not in control of driving. You are in control of putting a cigarette in your mouth. How is making smokers pay a higher rate than a non smoker "empowering businesses and government to make decisions many people on the left and right would prefer to make for themselves"??? What decision?

You're already paying for insurance for people who do risky things unless you don't have insurance. And people who don't do risky things can get cheaper health insurance so there are essentially penalties for engaging in certain kinds of risky behaviors. And how are you going to check to see if someone smokes or drives drunk or determine who gets to decide what behaviors are risky enough to prevent someone from getting subsidized health insurance. Oh, wait, I know the answer to the second part of that question. It'll be you!

Driving is not like smoking. You are not in control of driving. You are in control of putting a cigarette in your mouth. How is making smokers pay a higher rate than a non smoker "empowering businesses and government to make decisions many people on the left and right would prefer to make for themselves"??? What decision?[/quote

Well, firstly one is not entirely in control on the road. All sorts of things can happen beyond your control--you could have a seizure, your car could malfunction, you could be in a chain-reaction accident. Secondly, personally would be willing to consider lower costs for people who lead healthy lifestyles, but can we be sure it ends there? How about when genetic profiles start being used to determine health insurance rates? Pretty soon that becomes eugenics. These are not simple questions,