Romney or Obama (or Third party)

ProgBob wrote: Epignosis wrote: My premise is that insurance drives prices up, and that by requiring people to have insurance, the price of healthcare will increase even more.  As a foreigner, I'm finding this debate interesting but a bit confusing.  What sort of system would you advocate? Presumably, given the views you have expressed, not a socialised system where no-one is required to have insurance and everyone is provided with decent healthcare funded by taxes? So presumably you want some system where some (probably significant) proportion of people are uninsured.  What does being uninsured mean in practice in terms of the services you can access?  You said earlier that you were never denied treatment when you didn't have insurance, but I'm curious: are there some restrictions on what sort of treatments you can access?  Is it just emergencies for example?  What happens, for example, if you have a chronic illness that needs some sort of ongoing management?  Or if you need some sort of preventative treatment, or some tests that might catch something early?  Do you still need to pay if you get treatment without insurance?

Insurance is supposed to exist to compensate people who are victims of some grave misfortune, not pay for routine things.  "Major medical" is this type of insurance.  Insurance should not cover the gamut of health care services, because that drives up the cost.

That's not completely accurate for all forms of insurance, many of which offers benefits in addition to disaster protection. Whole life policies for example accrue cash value and in many cases can be used as collateral for loans.  Many premium auto insurance policies (including mine) pay dividends to those who drive safely and don't file excessive claims.  And most homeowner insurance policies provide a variety of benefits in addition to protecting the policy holder from damage to their home.

Actually, my health care 'insurance' isn't insurance at all, it's health care coverage for my family that is fully intended to cover preventive medicine, normal care including things like sports physicals for my children, pharmaceutical discounts and even inoculations like measles shots and the like.  I think you're somewhat fixated on the word "insurance" and seem to equate health care coverage with something like flood insurance.

I disagree you have shown this.  As I said before, the number and percentage of Americans covered by health insurance has declined steadily for more than a decade, yet the cost of health care continues to rise, almost exponentially.  As I said before, this is inconsistent with your theory.

Hospitals here have social workers who work with uninsured people facing disaster.  That said, it's a shame that long term treatment is so expensive because it can bankrupt people who need it.  But again, the solution is not force everyone into the insurance market- it's to identify reasons for the expensiveness.

Hospital bills account for nearly two-thirds of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. today, more than double all other causes combined.  Sadly, 78% of those people had health care coverage, but it was inadequate to cover their needs.  So you are correct that rising health care costs are causing millions of Americans to lose virtually everything they own, even people who are insured.  In fact, given those numbers it seems people without insurance are less likely to go bankrupt, mostly because their expenses are written off by hospitals as charitable expenses, or as operating losses.  This in turn means those hospitals pay less in taxes (charitable loss write offs), or increased costs for the rest of us when hospitals raise their rates for paying consumers to cover their losses.