Insurance makes a unnatural market allowing the providers to charge unrealistic prices for services rendered.
Democrats cannot permit insurance companies to create more marketable and transportable policies. Someone has to pay for Obamacare. Healthy people must be forced to pay more so that things like contraception, preventive medicine, and sex change operations and people with “preexisting conditions” can be covered.
Consider how much more an insurer would have to charge if people could buy auto insurance after an accident or policies were mandated to cover oil changes and tires! The only way Obamacare works is to force people to participate and pay in far more than some (most?) of them really need.
Those price controls and allocations were put in place by Nixon and William E. Simon as the first Administrator of the Federal Energy Office. They were kept in place under Ford and Carter.
Funny story about the gas lines. I graduated from high school in 1972 and lived in the Seattle area. I don’t remember the gas lines. It was just a news story for me. But the reason:
I worked as a janitor for the car repair shop and gas station at J.C. Penney’s at Southcenter and got off work at the same time the place opened for business. I would park my Vega GT at the pump, and then fill up before I went home.
At the time, I didn’t really think about how much grief I was saving myself. It was just how I got gas. The result is that I never lived the lines. It was something that happened to “everybody else”. On a side note, my wife is still amazed that the Vietnam war did not affect me or anyone in my family or circle of friends. Must be a weird “parallel dimension” thing.
In PA we had odd/even days for gas, so if your plate ended in an odd or even digit, you could only buy gas on those assigned days.
My wife and I had cars with one odd and one even plate, so every night, at 3:00 AM I would take the correct car to the Turnpike, drive up one exit and buy the allowed $5 worth turn around drive the other direction and buy $5 at the gas station on the opposite side and go home, and siphon the gas from my wife's car to mine {or into a 5 gallon can that I kept as a spare in my trunk.
I was an over the road salesman, and not having gas meant not making sales, and not eating.
We had grown very fond of eating.
Until the evil is exorcised from the White Hut, articles like this might as well start with, “Once upon a time, in a land that time forgot ...”