Insurance Mandates vs. Insurance Mandates
Easily the dumbest argument I’ve heard on the health care debate is that we should mandate health insurance because we mandate auto insurance. WS Journal letter writer Laura Young recently wrote:
People are required to have car insurance; why not health insurance? Personally, I’d rather insure my health than my auto. I can always get a new car, but my life is not as replaceable.
Neat, but no law requires you to insure your auto. If anyone requires you to insure your auto, it’s your lender or your lessor, and they’re doing it to protect their own interest, not yours. Apparently Ms. Young forgot that the mandatory part of auto insurance in most states is liability insurance, not comp or collision. And your liability insurance isn’t mandated to protect you; it’s mandated to protect the rest of us from you. Big difference. However, there does appear to be one important parallel between mandatory auto insurance and mandatory health insurance after all: neither mandate works.
Lameness points to the Ass. Press for noting that Massachusetts’s mandated health insurance “has passed legal muster” in the context of a discussion over whether a federal mandate would. Last time I checked, Massachusetts was a state, not a branch of the federal government.
