[erroneousfunk]

Tangential, but this is the same reason mandatory health insurance makes sense. We go around living in our bodies, and they break down sometimes. It's the law in this country that emergency rooms can't turn people away without evaluating and stabilizing them, so you're always one accident away from creating huge costs for someone else if you don't plan for these costs with health insurance.

In the case of car insurance, the injured party is the driver you run into, or the property you damage. In the case of health insurance, the injured party is the hospital/doctors.

I always thought it was strange that so many states were totally on board with mandatory car insurance, but not mandatory health insurance.

[chipperyman573]

Yes, but you can only choose to own a car (the logistics of this are hazy, but you still have the option of not buying one). You didn't choose to be an organism that gets sick.

[wahern]

Some counterpoints:

1) The Obamacare mandate is an income tax penalty. If you don't work there is no penalty. Working is a choice.

2) Of course, working isn't a _real_ choice if you value independence. Like you hinted at, unless you live in an urban environment with solid transit neither is owning a car.

3) Also, the limits of our society's moral and legal systems are already tested by the very idea of private property. If you don't own property there's no place in this entire country where you can reliably and _legally_ simply be physically present without paying for the privilege in some manner. And because of property taxes, that's the case even if you were gifted property.

All the griping about the healthcare mandate is simply a failure of people to accept the _reality_ of our modern system, and the privileges they take for granted but refuse to accept the burden of. In any event, we can't roll back the clock. At the end of the day, as long as you're free to leave the country the only thing that has changed is that freeloading becomes more difficult. Which reminds me of another point:

4) The reasons mandatory evacuations are legally enforceable is because society recognizes that people of good will--especially first responders--will always put themselves in harms way to help people in distress. And we don't want to have a system that, to disincentive abuse, discourages help by making it too risky to help others or by making it too costly to ask for help. This is a fundamental conflict between individual liberty and social welfare. Most of the time conflict between individual liberty and social welfare can be mediated by degrees; other times we're faced with a binary choice. Much like mandatory evacuations, Obamacare simply recognizes that in the 21st century, the conflict regarding healthcare has become a binary choice. When the conflict becomes a binary choice, for a civilization it's not really any choice at all.

[lagadu]

It's my understanding that having a car in the US is effectively mandatory for the overwhelming majority of the working population, doesn't that effectively make it the same?