Like has been pointed out to you before, you can choose not to buy a car. You can’t choose never to need health care.
They force us to pay for roads, highway patrol, and public transit via taxes on local, state and federal levels. Not that I’m complaining. But we already are forced to pay for transportation expenses via taxes.
Plus me not buying a car doesn’t increase the cost of buying a car to you. It costs about $1000 in premiums per insured family (out of roughly 12k a year in premiums) to cover the cost of the uninsured when they can’t pay medical bills and the costs are distributed across the medical spectrum to other people.
Re: the tax issue, rather than getting into this argument again, I’ll just post excerpts from the concurrence:
Just for completeness, I did strip out a cite from the above quote, for formatting reasons. Now, for a little bit more:
Unfortunately, there’s not a full analysis in the concurrence of this part of the tax issue.
You can choose to never need health insurance.
Warren Buffet could self-pay.
But you cannot choose to never need health care.
If someone chooses not to have insurance, then he is choosing theft. I thought Conservatives were against theft.
That’s not relevant from a legal standpoint.
Understood. I was countering the arguments above that it is utter impossible to go through life without health insurance. The follow up was that it was “theft” to do so.
Not so. You can self-pay for health insurance if you are wealthy enough/borrow enough/take a chance that you won’t get that sick and get hit by a bus and killed instantly at age 55. Even if you did freeload, it is no more theft than taking food stamps or Medicaid benefits.
And another poster makes a good point. Never mind whether you NEED a car or not, that would not legally matter either I suppose, but could Congress under the guise of regulating interstate commerce, pass a law requiring citizens to buy a car? a house? a boat? a swimming pool?
If that’s what it takes for you, then thanks for concurring.
'Course it would. That’s how you define participation (or not) in a market, under the Commerce Clause.
Again, there’s a big difference between taxing for the common good, and the forced purchase/commerce we’re talking about in this thread.
Ie, one is constitutional, and one is not.
How do you figure that? That’s only because the Government has decided to adopt the crazy payment scheme for the poor/deadbeats. Fix that problem, don’t create another one.
(If you wanted to do it with taxes, then fine, do it that way. But run on your tax raises honestly, not Democrat-style).
What “crazy payment scheme”?
IOW, before ObamaCare, nobody ever needed health care. 
Well, if in your mind it’s the Government’s job to pay for healthcare for everyone, then yes, your snark makes sense (to you).
That you would pay for the healthcare services for those who cannot afford it by taking money through higher insurance payments and fees for services rendered from those who can afford it.
Rather than do it the more honest way, through taxes (not that it would be good policy - it would be terrible policy since the country is broke and sliding towards Greece-like finances… but it would at least be constitutional that way).
You know that ObamaCare is very similar to a previous Republican proposal, right? Would you honestly prefer being forced into a single government plan, instead of having several insurance options to choose from?
I think they could, if it were part of a broader regulatory scheme that would be undercut if they didn’t require those purchases. But just like the Affordable Care Act, they couldn’t literally require everyone to buy a car.
In addition to being completely asinine to require every person living in Manhattan to buy a car, it’s probably impossible for most New Yorkers to obey such a law due to lack of space to park them. I’m no Constitutional expert, but I imagine there has to be some principle that prohibits the government from enforcing laws against people not capable of obeying them. We obviously can’t require those below the poverty line to buy something they can’t afford (unless we give them subsidies). And those with religious objections might argue that it violates their First Amendment rights, so they’d be exempt too.
This is all purely academic speculation, because there’s zero chance Congress is going to require everyone to purchase a car or a home. It is only because of the special nature of the health care system that their unique solution (the insurance mandate) was imposed on us.
So how would you alleviate the problem of poor people dying on the streets?
Don’t even try that bad policy stuff. It’s very clear that universal healthcare produces equal or better objective outcomes for a fraction of the cost of our private system.
Why is it the government’s job to alleviate every possible bad outcome in life? Why do we put no faith in the ability of Americans to earn their own money to pay for their own healthcare?
RNATB, you and I probably couldn’t be more different politically, but generally you speak reasonably in your posts (unlike several others here). Is there not enough evidence out there that the US simply cannot afford this larger government intrusion into our lives? That we’re broke and busted and putting the bills on the credit card for the children?
I hate to threadjack but take a look at the front page of the Washington Post today - a very lefty-friendly publication. They talk about the consequences of governments living beyond their means, and the chaos that ensues when the bill comes due, since people come to be dependent on the greater government footprint and lose the motivation to work hard for themselves to earn the benefits.
As the WaPo puts it, “There is a giant gap between what many of the world’s governments have promised and what they can afford.”
So, to answer your question, what would I do about the poor dying in the streets? Create a network of basic care clinics, funded honestly through taxes and not some unconstitutional bullshit reading of the Commerce clause that have the founders spinning in their graves, and tell the truth to the American people: we don’t have unlimited resources, and poor people won’t get care equal to what rich people can afford. This is the truth with every other good and service, why not health care. It’s not some made-up ‘right’ - rights don’t have to be paid for by others - it’s a service like any other.
I hate it when I hear things like ‘life is priceless’. Bullshit. If it were, the speed limit would be 5 MPH nationally.