People have to be responsible for health and car. Can we agree? Even Libertarians!

We don’t let people die on street-corners in the US. This is good policy for a number of reasons the most easy to understand is that it is unhealthy for the population as a whole to have diseased people not being cared for.

We have decided as a society we will pick up your tab for healthcare if you can’t.

A lot of people will if given the choice not purchase health insurance until they need it, i.e. they get a disease. Before Obamacare this was discouraged by basically allowing the insurance companies to say “Hell No,” which meant that you ran the risk if you didn’t carry insurance that you would be bankrupted by an illness or get really substandard care.

Under Obamacare the idea is that pre-existing conditions are not something that can be used as a condition for denial and we wouldn’t charge ridiculous prices for this insurance. However, given that people would have a natural instinct to not pay until they got sick the government is requiring you to get insurance. They are trying to provide cheap plans so you can get one and keep it but you have to buy insurance.

This is NOT an unreasonable trade-off. I believe Obamacare as it is implemented is a disaster but the idea of people paying for their healthcare is perfectly reasonable even for a libertarian.

One of the principals of Libertarian philosophy is choice. Many libertarians seem to think that means the choice to be irresponsible. Certainly it does in some respects. If you choose to do drugs, libertarians believe that is your problem. If you want to jump off a cliff that is your choice.

However, we as a society will never accept pure libertarian-ism about some things like basically letting you die on the street-corner. I also believe that liberarian-ism shouldn’t extend to auto insurance.

If you are a billionaire and can afford to pay off the expenses of any of your behaviors fine. You don’t have to have insurance. However, if you can’t afford to pay off a million dollar claim when you kill 3 people in your car accidentally then you shouldn’t be able to drive. You have to be responsible.

I believe this is a core philosophy of libertarianism: responsibility. You are responsible for your actions. Getting in a car without insurance and without assets to pay for any accident you may get into is criminal because you could be in the position of causing other people millions of dollars in damage and not be able to be responsible.

In the same way if you live in America you cannot avoid health insurance as a choice simply because we as a society have agreed to pay the millions of dollars it might cost to save you if you get some illness and you are being irresponsible if you don’t contribute at least some insurance to cover this possibility.

I don’t believe this is debatable. I don’t see why people are arguing about forced insurance requirements. We do it for cars. You can’t drive a car without insurance.

I had a situation where I lent my car to a physical trainer I knew. Over the weekend I was gone he was sitting at a light when 2 cars driven by illegal immigrants crashed in front of him and careened into his car crushing his leg and requiring significant medical care.

The cars owners did not have insurance. My paltry insurance didn’t cover a fraction of his medical expenses. He ended up losing his job and being disabled for the rest of his life. There was no compensation. Having illegals in America means some people don’t have insurance or find it difficult to get insurance and bad things happen like this.

I don’t know if the illegals involved were irresponsible or simply found it impossible to get proper insurance but this whole situation points out a number of ethical issues that are clear and unequivocal. The state requires you have insurance for legitimate reasons like the above. I have always been proud to carry insurance.

The argument will be made some people can’t afford the insurance that’s why they don’t do it. That’s in essence part of the reason for Obamacare. If we have cheap insurance and require people to have it then we can get rid of problems like pre-existing conditions and uninsured people. In principal I have no problem with this.

Now that we have decided everybody must have medical insurance we can also decide some other issues easily that simplifies the discussion.

If you don’t get medical insurance then you should pay a tax equal to the cost of the medical insurance. This is perfectly reasonable even for a responsible libertarian.

If you can’t afford medical insurance then the government will have to pay some of your insurance costs so you can pay what you can. That is pretty much impossible to argue around. Remember we have all agreed somebody has to pay if you get sick because we aren’t letting people die by the curbside.

There should be minimal insurance coverage which meets minimal levels of responsibility we set as a society.

I believe we can make the case that pre-existing conditions is also a morally unambiguous issue. Since everybody one way or another has to buy insurance then there is no reason for allowing companies to choose you based on pre-existing conditions or more correctly there should always be an option somehow for people with pre-existing conditions. The fact is there shouldn’t be pre-existing conditions because it means you didn’t have insurance which you can’t not have.

I would even go to the extent of saying that if you get seriously sick and it is discovered as you go to the doctor or hospital you didn’t have coverage in some way they could simply extract all previous premiums from you with interest and penalty for failure to comply with the law.

I believe everyone should be able to agree to these tenants of basic societal rules. I don’t think this is a matter of being republican, democrat, green party or libertarian. This is unassailable logic. It is common sense.

Socialists, democrats may want to go farther and regulate and do more but at a minimum we can all agree even libertarians everyone living in America must be responsible otherwise it is a crime.

If you disagree I would really love to hear where this logic falls apart. To me the only possible argument is if you believe people should just die on the streets.