So the solution is to make it easier for them to freeload off of us even more? Good plan.
No, the solution is minimize those who we all have to pay for and lower the costs of taking care of them.
Let me take a real world situation and you tell me how we should take care of it.
A woman shows up in the emergency room with a serious hear attack. She need s immediate attention and with ICU after care the bill is estimated to be $100,000.
She lives pay check to pay check and does not have insurance.
Does the hospital treat her? If so who pays for it?
I find that after my own investigations, and a review of this thread and some of your salient points, I would have to agree.
I won't comment on those blatantly ignoring facts, but to the conservatives that presented good solutions or alternatives, thanks, they have provided food for thought.
To briefly weigh in on this issue, I agree that minimizing the costs of taking care of the uninsured is the best we can do in our system in order to provide the most freedom and justice. I mean this in terms of commutable, equitable and moral justice.
Equitable justice will be achieved by causing all people to possess health insurance, spreading overall risk equally between consumers. This is the best we can hope to achieve in present society, as there are no possible measures to individually assess each person and prescribe them health care based on their individual health habits (i.e., diet, exercise habits, etc.). Therefore, the most equitable thing to do is to ascribe the same chance of contracting a disease, getting harmed in an accident, etc. to all citizens.
In terms of commutable justice, by spreading the overall risk between the entire population it ensures that every actor will act in a way that will ensure the survival of the status quo because they equally benefit from cheaper, more accesible health care, only provided because of the mitigated risk of the uninsured.
In terms of moral justice, its very hard to argue this point. In my point of view, ensuring them all reduces the chance of moral hazards and helps to ensure moral justice, but there is never a fully enforceable form of that.
In short, by maintaining our private health care system while requiring a federal mandate will continue to allow the free market to work in a limited fashion while also ensuring that justice is served to the American populace.
If there were ways to ensure that taxpayers didn't have to pay for those who CHOSE (not couldn't afford) to pay for health insurance, then it would be fair to say that a mandate is infringing on liberty. But if a person who chooses not to get health insurance gets sick, and can't pay for the subsequent bill (which they may have been able to afford with insurance) or get help to pay for it, then the taxpayer must pay. Since this cannot be avoided, we must lower the costs and mitigate risks, so I agree.