Can someone tell me why having health insurance is bad?
The only people who don't want health insurance are healthy youngs, who don't believe they need it and don't want to pay for it, and people who have religious objections to treatments of modern western medicine. The current legislation extends the period of protection that youngs can enjoy under their parents' plans and exempts those with religious or anti-western-medicine concerns from the "mandate." So, the objection of those opposed to health insurance "mandates" isn't really about these groups, and isn't about people thinking that having health insurance is a bad thing.
Objections about the so-called "freedom" not to buy health insurance are really veiled objections of some who don't want their tax dollars to fund an expansion of Medicaid coverage or subsidies that would help poors buy health insurance. (Never mind that we pay anyway, in the form of higher premiums and tax costs for uncompensated care.) They are also objections from businesses that don't want to have to buy plans to make available to their employees. (And this is despite the fact that the new law gives them tax credits to do it and that new statewide exchanges--a Republican idea, as were mandates--will allow employees to go shop for themselves).
So, the objection is really not about people's "freedom" not to buy health insurance or believing that having health insurance is bad. It's rather about taxpayers wanting the freedom not to subsidize anything that doesn't directly benefit them and the freedom of businesses not to use scarce capital to buy employee plans. They would prefer that people who can't afford health insurance fend for themselves, either by finding ways to pay for it at market prices or just going without it. In the end, I really don't believe that this whole conflagration is about "mandates" or "the commerce clause," or even about "freedom" in any really meaningful philosophical sense of the word. It's about money out of people's pockets that goes to the benefit of others. And when we're talking about that money being for health care, the high costs of which are only going ever-more-rapidly upward, the stakes only get higher for everyone; individuals, businesses, providers, insurers, and government.
Money forms the contours of a lot of American debates about freedom. I think that's understandable in certain cases. But in the larger scheme of things, it's unfortunate. Freedom means more than money. Neither capitalists nor Marxists understand that.
