Mandated Health Insurance

Mark Thoma makes an important point about the “individual mandate” that applies equally well to health care and to Social Security:

“I don’t see anything wrong with asking people to pay the expected value of their health care — a mandate to get insurance to cover the catastrophic things that society would cover in any case — to avoid this type of gaming of the system. Yes, it’s true that many healthy people will pay, remain healthy, and seem to get nothing. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. They have insurance whether they pay for it or not. Society will not let them die of a standard, treatable illness so insurance services are present. In fact, it’s the knowledge that society is providing these services that motivates many people to take a chance and go without.”

Insurance is a betting game where you bet against yourself. We buy fire insurance and hope we lose our money, or our house doesn’t burn down. This is also true of auto insurance, disaster insurance, crop insurance, business insurance, leg insurance or whatever.

Now a motorcycle driver may complain like mad about his individual right to not wear a helmet, or carry adequate insurance, a government invasion of his personal rights but if he or she gets into a accident, who pays, the rest of society. Now the extreme right folk would seem happy to say let the dumb ass die but that is not the way of a civilized society who has the ability to care of its citizens, including the dumb ones or the poor ones who can’t afford insurance.

Insurance is redistribution of wealth for a good cause. It seems moral to me.