Broccoli - Doctors for America

Broccoli - Doctors for America:

The health care market is unlike any other market because health care costs are unpredictable and are not meaningfully bounded on the upside. Break an arm and your costs could be in thousands of dollars. Have a heart attack and you’re in the tens of thousands of dollars. Get cancer and you could enter the hundreds of thousands of dollars category. There’s no way to prepare for such illnesses and their costs. That’s why health insurance exists, to smooth out these costs over a lifetime and to pool our resources to help those with catastrophic costs to pay for them. The purpose of mandating the purchase of health insurance is to have everyone pay into a system that they will eventually use. Equating broccoli and health insurance is specious and a sign of bad faith on the part of those making that argument. As far as I know, nobody has died because they couldn’t get their hands on some broccoli.

When broccoli is 1/6th of the economy of the nation, give me a holler. Maybe then it should be regulated.

In the meantime, what we are hearing is a deliberately misleading meme about 'limiting principles," AKA, "where do we draw the line?" My answer is that we don't draw the line at health care, a fundamental human need that now accounts for one sixth of all economic activity in the US. This is clearly NOT where to draw the line. We can argue about where TO draw the line when the Federal Government tries to mandate burial insurance or some other completely random pseudo-analogy thought up by Fox News and fellow travelers.

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