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[merrily]

59. You just moved the goalpost.

Your prior post said it was something they didn't want OR need. I refuted the need portion of your statement, I did not dispute the want portion.

Lenders aside, people can choose to do without health insurance only because no law says otherwise. No law says otherwise because, again, removing lenders from the equation, the only one who suffers financial loss when a home burns down is the person or persons who paid for the home.

When an uninsured person who cannot afford to pay for health care gets very ill, the uninsured person is not the only one who bears the financial loss. Rather, that financial loss is borne by everyone who does buy health insurance for themselves or pay for their own medical care out of their own pockets. Excessive use of emergency rooms also raises the costs of health care and hospitals pass that differential on to the rest of us as well. And people who go broke paying for an unexpected illness become eligible for Medicaid and other assistance; and every taxpayer pays for that. So, home insurance and health insurance are not comparable at all.

Another difference is that this law also requires health insurers to cover pre-existing conditions. Supposedly, what makes that fair is requiring all of us to have health insurance, even if we don't feel we need it yet.

Does getting health insurers to cover a kid with a malignant brain tumor or a woman with breast cancer or someone born without a healthy heart valve mean that some of us are forced to buy insurance when we don't think we need it? Yes. That is the kind of thing decent human beings do for other human being in a human society.

I pay for the military when I don't think we should have gone to war after WWII ended. I pay for traffic lights and traffic cops though I don't own a car. I pay for cops, though I've never committed a crime, don't intend to commit a crime, or had one committed against me. That's how being a member of a society works. We all pay for the benefit of us ALL.

I would have preferred by far medicare for all, wherein taxes paid by all of us would have covered all of us. However, that was supposedly impossible to pass. Given a choice between buying insurance and letting really sick people die without medical care, I'd buy health insurance.