ACA: What Happens If You Don't Get Insurance, Pay The Penalty Tax, And Then Get Sick?

[Zalatix]

109. I'd rather pay for it in taxes, to the Medicare for All program. Here's why.

Okay, here we go.

The law of large numbers is an insurance term that says the larger the number of insureds on your policy, the less risk of loss you as an insurer suffer from people getting sick. IOW an insurer is more stable when they have 100,000 policyholders paying premiums than 1,000: the number of sick people is less likely to exhaust your funds.

Inductively, this means Medicare for All, by definition a policy that covers all Americans, is a risk pool of 300+ million Americans. No insurance company can ever come anywhere close to this risk pool.

Furthermore, insurance corporations have about 20-30% operational overhead, that means for every 1 dollar you pay them in premiums, only 70-80% goes to providing you insurance coverage. Medicare? 3%, which means 97% of the taxes you pay into it, goes into providing you insurance coverage.

On top of this, Medicare is accountable to voters. What voters can tell Cigna what to do?

Your dollar goes much further with Medicare for All than it ever will with private insurance corporations.

The problem with the individual mandate is it invites people to not be insured and pay a tax penalty instead. This will bite us on the ass. These cheaters will make us worse off than before the mandate came along.

Medicare for All? Everyone is covered, automatically.


BTW: I never once said I oppose all of the ACA, or that I want to see it abolished. The problem is the individual mandate.