Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
Uh, if you don't have insurance, you pay for the health care, all of it, when you need it.
That is a risk you take. Like not having car insurance. Get into a wreck? You pay for it out of your own pocket.
Which is why I don't see the fine as anything else than a backhanded way by the government to force people into public insurance.
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The uninsured actually pose a great public risk in that sense, because most of them would become bankrupt if they were in a car crash or became seriously ill. The result is that the cost of their urgent care (which they are entitled to receive) is borne by the public, and that becomes highly cumbersome to the system.
This is the "illegal immigrant" problem in the U.S.--which is actually a pretty big problem, even if congressional republicans utterly fail to understand it. Illegal immigrants generally don't carry health insurance, and aren't offered benefits of any kind through their employer. However, they do (like other humans) occasionally get sick or injured, meaning that they go to emergency rooms in public and private hospitals, where they must be provided with urgent care that is billed by those hospitals but
paid for by the taxpayer.
Most people have no problem accepting that these people represent a burden to the health-care system. What becomes the issue is when (like you) a person claims the "right" to not carry health insurance at all, and to assume the risk themselves. Well, unless you're very wealthy, you can't reasonably assume that risk--and the result is that you are asking taxpayers and people with insurance to help carry the burden of that risk with higher premiums and taxes. In other words: people who opt not to carry health insurance (or who can't afford it--that's another issue) are a burden to the health care system, even if they don't intend to be.
So... yeah. It's unfair. And you shouldn't be allowed to do it. I shouldn't have to be using my own tax money and insurance premiums to make sure that you can get your chest cracked open in an American E.R. The simplest solution is if there is a public insurance option that is available to you for the provision of basic care.
Now there are two types--those who can't afford insurance, and those who don't want it. Obviously, these cases call for different solutions, but it's clearly not acceptable to keep
asking everyone else to pay for their risk (don't forget that in insurance terms, risk translates into cost) without asking them to start paying for it themselves, or finding some more equitable way to distribute that risk.