I agree with the general point about removing restrictions in the health care market. It is going too far, however, in our mixed health-care market, to describe people who refuse to prioritize insurance coverage over other spending as engaging in some sort of should-be-sacred personal freedom. In fact, such individuals know quite well that the community will provide for their needs, should they become acutely ill, and that this cost will be passed on in the ever-rising prices everyone who chooses to act responsibly in this matter must pay.

I agree with the position, but the implications are that if the uninsured get ill, and they eventually will, they must be treated either by a charitable hospital limited by the size of its endowment or by a Mother Theresa helping them to die. But to solve this problem by a creating a socialist national health care system is overkill. I agree with Tina that under the interventionist model we have now its logic suggest more controls and restrictions on choice. Eventually it will go all the way to socialism or collapse. Perhaps some middle ground can be found. The subject has similarities with the obligation for drivers to have liability insurance if they want to use the roads.
Hard subject.

Why must we pay for healthcare with insurance ?

When was the last time you paid your groceries or gas fillup with insurance ?

When was the last time you paid for an oil change with insurance ?

When was the last time you paid for your vacations plane tickets with insurance ?

When was the last time you paid for your pizza delivery with insurance ?

Insurance should be for catastrophic but very unlikely events, not for everyday routine medical maintenance.

I don’t have insurance, I pay out of my pockets and if I can’t pay well I can die, freedom has a price and I’m ready to pay that price.

The America’s Affordable Health Choices
Act of 2009 (H.R. 3200)

“The public option will operate on a level playing field. It will be subject to the same market reforms and consumer protections as other private plans in the Exchange and it will be self-sustaining – financed only by its premiums.”
If the government forces people to purchase the insurance, then the words “premium” and “level playing field” are Orwellian Newspeak; let us call it what it really is. It is a tax to be handed over to Big Insurance and the medical establishment.

“…individuals will be responsible for obtaining and maintaining health insurance coverage. Those who choose to not obtain coverage will pay a penalty of 2.5 percent of modified adjusted gross income above a specified level.”
So if the serfs do not obey the tyrant and hand over their hard earned property to Big Insurance, then they pay higher taxes. The rationale for this theft is the myth that those who are not covered by a third party are the people who receive uncompensated care, when in fact the uncompensated care is the result of Medicare, Medicaid and Big Insurance refusing to pay the full sticker price which the uninsured do pay. The billions reported as uncompensated care is money which providers did not receive from the Big Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid; now the government will force the uninsured, who have been paying more all along (full sticker price) to hand over their property to Big Insurance which has not been paying full sticker price and claim it is the uninsured’s own fault. WOW! Talk about privileged elites…did someone say feudalism?

It is interesting that health insurance companies are the only business that is practically immune to recessions. They get too much government protection.
Obama’s plan would ruin their business. The free market reforms would threaten their comfortable position in the market. The status quo, which under serves the public, is the optimal position in terms of risk to profits ratio. Insurance companies have it made.

OK, so how do we lower costs?

Maybe this is a power grad by the government, but a seam has opened up that allows them to do it. That seam is the fact that since 2002, premium costs have gone up 87%, and industry profits have gone up 428%.

Either they are making things very efficient and not passing on the savings, or they are taking more money and spending less of it. For all I know, they only had a 1% profit in 2002, and now it’s 4.28%… who knows? The question is, how come there are no insurers that have delivered more care for less money since 2002? Isn’t that how pretty much every other business effectively tries to operate? Deliver more for less? That’s the theory of competition, at least.

I’m self employed. Where are these free market insurers?

How come none will write me a policy for close to the same rate as they charge the largest companies?

How can I be assured that my health takes priority over responsibility to their shareholders? How come 70% of people who filed bankruptsy due to medical bills had insurance?

I agree that freedom of choice is fantastic. I throw my support behind it.

Now where’s my affordable insurance?

I’ve been pretty frugal the past couple of years. I spent my last paycheck on a house, and I won’t have another product to sell for possibly a year, so I have watched my expenses. One thing I did buy was a portable defib unit. The thing is great – it will actually talk you through the procedure. I wrote on the big button, “To save life, press here,” and I’ve told all my neighbors where it is in an emergency.

So the government will let me treat a heart attack, and there is nothing they can do to prevent me from stitching myself up, but God forbid I be allowed to keep antibiotics and painkillers on hand.

I don’t know where you got the impression there is a free market for health care.

What do students do for health insurance? Do you have a group plan you can buy into? That must be nice. I feel locked out.

If I wasn’t on all these antidepressants, I might be resentful

Let’s get rid of one of the largest labor unions, the AMA, and get real savings, more doctors, and better care.

Sanjay,

The 50 million figure is completely bogus. When you remove non-US citizens, people transitioning between jobs, college kids, people who do not have insurance but who qualify for existing government programs and do not use them, and people who make well above the median income but choose not to buy insurance, the number comes out to less than 10 million. One source claims that it is about 8.2 million. Out of those 8.2 million, it is difficult to identify how many are uninsured by choice.

Why the deception? Because if it is a “crisis”, then government is invited to step in to fix it.

If you don’t believe me, google “50 million uninsured”. You’ll find the NCHC happily quoting the “almost 50 million” figure, while the rest of the links I visited gave evidence to the contrary.

Fantastic but I think you could have include a bit on “the knowledge problem”.

With all this talk about universal health care, why isn’t anyone discussing the obvious moral issue?

Seventy years ago, when I was a child, we were taught that citizens of a free society had “unalienable rights”–meaning rights that were not transferable from one person to another.

We had rights to our own bodies and to our own minds and to the property they produced together. This property, like ourselves, belonged to us alone. No one else had a priority “right” to it.

If someone we knew had medical problems they couldn’t handle themselves, and we voluntarily decided to help, we helped them and were proud of it.

But, nobody, including the state, had a priority right to take our property from us by force, through taxes, to pay someone else’s medical bills. That would be considered ordinary theft and therefore profoundly immoral.

Why aren’t our new public servants in Washington defending our moral, unalienable rights to our own property and ourselves?

Ken MacDonald