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.
December 1st, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Factual matters about insurance aside, note the spurious argument beloved by State-fellators such as Ms. Young: “If the State already requires you to do X, why not X+Y? In fatc, why not Z?” And thus Leviathan grows.
December 1st, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Your ABC link is dead.
[D'oh! Fixed now. -X]
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..The New Face of the GOP =-.
December 1st, 2009 at 6:09 pm
And, also, the liability insurance mandate is only for cars driven on public roads/property.
Drive a car on a racetraack, it doesn’t need to be insured. A truck on private property only (such as a utility truck on a large ranch), likewise.
(Libertarian-theory-wise, that insurance mandate is defensible, as Nozick would argue, because driving poses significant risks to others, which are unlikely to otherwise be properly covered in case of the risk becoming actual damage.
A health “insurance” mandate, not so much.)
December 1st, 2009 at 6:43 pm
The argument is as auto liability coverage protects us from you, forcing you to buy health insurance protects us from having to pay your (uninsured) medical bills.
December 1st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Right, but the constitutional argument is that the federal government is a government of enumerated powers, while the state’s powers are plenary. So any state law is presumptively constitutional unless it violates a specific provision of the constitution, while any federal law is presumptively unconstitutional unless a specific provision of the Constitution authorizes it. So of course it’s constitutional for Massachusetts to force people to buy health insurance; it doesn’t follow that it’s constitutional for the federal government to do likewise.
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Steve: Indeed… but the problem there is that they shouldn’t be paying my bills in the first place.
If I hit someone with my car, I’ve damaged him, and it’s completely defensible to require I’m capable of paying the costs to risks I voluntarily undertake.
If I get sick without insurance, I suggest that the better alternative to “make me buy insurance so that that way someone else won’t have to pay” is for them to… just not pay.
By which I mean, don’t give me free treatment.
(Or, alternatively, since that’s politically impossible, give free treatment of a limited and basic sort to people who lack insurance, and let charities cover the rest for those who are not without insurance by choice.
And pay for it all with taxes, rather than a mandate that I have the coverage the State’s technocrats have decided I must have.
[For instance, I'm led to believe that in the current plan, I would be required to have a policy that covered addiction treatment. But I'm in very little danger of acquiring an addiction, due to my makeup ... so why should a bureaucrat tell me I have to pay for coverage for it?
That is a horribly inefficient way to "save them from paying" for my medical costs.
Especially since the only "cost" of me being, say, an alcoholic, would be lower tax revenue... for that matter, I suspect many mandatory-everything proponents might think that producing less tax revenue is something that they should prevent forcefully.])
December 4th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I don’t believe in mandatory car insurance either: http://miriamsideas.blogspot.com/2009/11/thousands-dont-have-car-insurance.html
December 17th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
What Sigivald said. Further, you can avoid paying auto insurance by not driving altogether. Is the alternative to health insurance being dead?
December 17th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Being dead is drastic, but it would work. What will also work is simply ignoring the law, as the 15 percent who don’t have liability insurance but drive anyway do.
December 18th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
The 15% figure is meaningless, as it’s a national figure, and everything about insurance varies drastically by state. Some states are very good at enforcing financial responsibility laws, while others blow chunks at it. Of course you don’t care, as you seem to think one person’s dubious “right” to endanger others is just as sacred as another’s legitimate right to endanger himself.
December 19th, 2009 at 3:07 am
God dammit, X, you know it pisses me off when we agree on stuff!
December 21st, 2009 at 10:29 pm
X: You don’t know what I think, unless you’re clairvoyant.
I think that passing laws which large numbers of people ignore breeds disrespect for the law. Remember prohibition?
November 14th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Hey, xlrq, I like your style. You are right. I believe Obamacare will be struck down, on the mandatory issue, because of its constitutional problems. Then, again, considering who is on the Supreme Court, who knows? Alan