wrote in message
...
On May 4, 3:28 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:

I can not see how that would happen. Assuming he had the same medical
problems, he would have had the same treatment and would be the same
cost or drag to society's medical system.

Dan

If he were part of an insured community, he would be contributing to the
pool from which everyone in that insurance cohort may or may not draw,
depending on whether they have a health care need. He would be
contributing
whether or not he needed the service himself. That's insurance.


Ed Huntress

You are correct in that he is not contributing. So the net result
is worse. As I see it same drag, different amounts of support.


Dan

In the end, it's less about the net financial result than it is about
whether the money comes from a source that is calculated to distribute the
costs, and to which we contribute in order to be responsible for ourselves,
or from a general tax fund.

This raises interesting questions in regard to a system of uniform health
care. I've argued this with my son (who does economic research in this
field), and I've tried taking both sides of the argument. d8-) My conclusion
is that ducking the problem by not participating in an insurance system of
some kind is socially destructive, no matter whether it saves money or just
winds up costing the same. In one sense, we already have universal health
care. It's just that a significant portion of it is coercive, in which
people without insurance basically hold the rest of us up, relying on our
unwillingness to just let people die in the streets as their coercive force.
We could solve a lot of the social problem with a system of universal
"insurance" to which one contributes what he can, with subsidies if
necessary.

Then we wouldn't have to push the Gunners of the world out into the street
and leave them there until they turn to dust -- which is the libertarian
solution, of course. That's another problem with libertarianism: It could
get awfully smelly.

--
Ed Huntress