So, then the government should force us to pay into anything they say is "good" for us then?
We the people make the government. If enough people agree, then yes. And I have no problem with a standing army.
I think some of various people's answers have basically made my point for me as far as not caring about other people. If you're happy that way, hooray for you.
Skar, I never talked about anything being free. You're the one who brought up "free" as far as I can tell. I agree with you that nothing is free.
I never asked insurance companies to pay for my daughter's healthcare. I asked them to let her be covered. Assuming doctors aren't lying to us (and she doesn't have some horrible disease they haven't told us about that will create huge medical expenses, or that what they have told us about isn't much much worse than they've said), chances are we'd pay them more money than they'd ever pay out for us. (That's the way insurance works like you said, though what I said about how insurance works is still true. Sick people do pay part of their own costs but the rest is paid by healthy people. Insurance companies wouldn't have money to cover the costs of sick people if healthy people didn't give it to them.) And we have a high deductible plan so we'd pay for most of it anyway unless something catastrophic happened.
The profit motive did not cause mutual insurance companies to come into existence. A desire to help each other out and get help when you needed it did. Unfortunately the profit motive is what has caused most mutual insurance companies to go out of existence: selling out to for-profit companies in order to make a short-term gain because they were deluded into thinking coverage would be just as good. I think it's pretty darn obvious that reliance on the profit motive to provide good healthcare has shown that that model is a failure. Healthcare is too important to leave up to the profit motive.
I never said 30-year-olds and 80-year-olds should pay the same amount. The health insurance I have has age brackets and that makes sense to me. 80-year-olds also have different types of expenses as 30-year-olds. And I do agree that allowing cross-state access would be a good thing, though a point has been brought up that some states allow crappy insurance to be sold there and I think there should be some kind of minimum standard. States with car insurance requirements (is that all of them?) have minimum standards people live with.
But anyway, I see healthcare as a common good that benefits everyone. You don't. That's the gist of it.
When there is an ambulance with a siren speeding up behind you, why do you pull over? Do you do it only because it's the law? Or do you do it because you hope that one day when you're in an ambulance and need to get to the hospital fast there better darn not be a bunch of slowpoke cars blocking your ambulance's path? Pulling over for someone else's ambulance helps YOU because if it's a habit everyone has then they'll pull over for your ambulance in the future. It's a public good. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. But pulling over for an ambulance is also a public good that's mandated by the law and I have no problem with that mandate.
Doctors are required to help people without knowing whether they can pay for good reasons (and I already said how you pay for other people's healthcare now whether you like it or not, by your own costs going up). If you get hit by a car and can't talk or move or anything, you want an ambulance to come help you whether or not they've found your insurance card already, don't you? That's a protection you'd lose if government regulation went away. Each and every one of those regulations was put in place when people took a good look at the abuses that were happening without those regulations and said, "This is not the kind of country we are." (Some regulations don't work quite right but trashing them all is not the answer.) And that's what people are saying now. "This is not the kind of country we are." (Of course, people disagree what kind of country we aren't. I don't think we should be a welfare state but the system we have is crap and it's not because of too much government regulation.)
Everyone can make a poll, apparently. Harris polls: People in other countries, including Canada, like their healthcare more than the US's and more than people in the US like their own. Only EIGHT PERCENT of Canadians think the US's system is better.
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_08_12.pdfhttp://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=927