Mandatory Health Insurance
Americans want health insurance—as long as they don’t have to pay for it themselves. They are used to getting it as an employment benefit, which is free are far as they are concerned, but they don’t want to have to pay for it on their own. If they have no health insurance, which many of them don’t, they don’t worry about—they just assume they will survive somehow—probably at someone else’s expense.
I did this myself once, I was in a crazy state, and I had a severe medical crisis. I ended up costing a fine hospital a lot of money, which I could never pay back. After this, I made sure I always had medical insurance—which is cheap in Costa Rica.
This situation is similar to the requirement for automobile insurance. If you own a car you have to insure it. But the enforcement of this is lax—and many people, if their cash is low, will simply skip it.
The only solution means that the law must be able to identify these people and force them to pay. But the idea of a National identity system and the requirement that everyone must stay registered with it, is horrifying to many. They are used to being invisible whenever they please.
This is a matter of privacy, an area of great concern to me. But I think privacy can be overdone. Once when my ex-wife had a psychotic episode, and disappeared without a trace, leaving me desperate to know where she was, it would have helped both of us if she could have been located before she really cracked up—which she did.
The huge data banks which the NSA, and many private companies, are compiling about every one of us is not a good thing. We don’t live in a totalitarian state—at least not yet. But a minimum amount of control is necessary, to force us to be responsible and make us pay for our insurance, both medical and vehicle.