Poll: Americans Want Dem Health Care Reforms, Not Dem Bills

oh, we've been through this before, but here's a quick internet search, from wiki, so they have citations you can follow to read the articles for yourself, if you are actually interested,

or you could look at places like vermont (etc) or even Mass, where 20% of the people who have mandated insurance are too poor to actually use it, and as everyone says, it matches what the President is proposing.

anyway, shorthand response:

A 2004 editorial in USA Today asserted that United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) data show the uninsured are unfairly billed for services at rates far higher—on average 305% at urban hospitals in California—than are the insured; USA Today concluded that "millions of [uninsured patients] are forced to subsidize insured patients."[12] The Wall Street Journal reported that mandates squeeze "those in the middle" in Massachusetts and that nationally CBO estimates "as many as nine million legal American residents might still go without insurance under the initial House legislation released in July, despite its subsidies."[13] The Los Angeles Times reported in 2009 that current proposed mandates without cost controls "add up to higher costs for taxpayers and consumers."[14] The Washington Post reports that even with mandates insurers will likely continue discrimination to "chase away the chronically ill," quoting Karen Pollitz, research professor at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute: "The race is to the bottom."[15]

National Nurses United, the nation's largest registered nurses organization and a supporter of Medicare-for-all, ranked the individual mandate first in a list of 10 problems explaining their opposition to the current Congressional proposals.[16] The California Nurses Association, which supports single-payer healthcare, added that due to "insurance company pirates and their predatory pricing practices...subsidies and tweaking will amount to little more than an umbrella in a hurricane."[17] Physicians for a National Health Program, which also supports single-payer healthcare, wrote that "mandate-based health reforms don't work."[18]

Citing data from the Urban Institute and the experience of Massachusetts (see below), the Cato Institute argues that without the uninsured, "The insured would pay more, not less."[19] The Pacific Research Institute argues that the uninsured subsidize the insured, do not drive up the cost of health care, and use fewer services than the insured.[20]

There is also disagreement as to whether federal mandates would be constitutional,[21] and state initiatives opposing federal mandates may lead to litigation and delay.[22][23] In 1994, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report describing an individual mandate as "an unprecedented form of federal action." The agency also wrote, "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."[24]

I hate to burst your bubble but a lot of the people who are uninsured are uninsured by choice, and the reasons aren't that hard to understand. For a large majority of people health insurance is a bad bet...

And so we propose to enact a cumbersome, laborious structure (the individual mandate) to combat the free-rider problem, that dramatically enhances the profits of, and reinforces the power of, an industry which has been documented to have violated the law and the rights of its customers an uncountable number of times. (Last Monday the Republican Commissioner of Insurance in California issued a finding of over 700 violations of the law by a single actor in this industry, Anthem Blue Cross, between 2006 and 2009, in a single state. Violations included failure to pay claims, misrepresenting policy and other information to consumers, and stonewalling regulatory agencies. This same actor has paid over US$4.2 billion in dividends to its parent company Wellpoint since 2004. Wellpoint's CEO's compensation package last year totaled US$9.6 million.)

If you think you've got a free rider problem, then typically what you do is recognize you're dealing with a public good and fund its provision through taxation. Like national defense, or local police and fire services. Now let's see, if only someone could figure out how to do that for health care....