I would support this if you could get out of it by signing a waiver that would prohibit you from taking a dime of taxpayer money if you got sick and couldn’t pay for your own treatment.
After all, that is the real problem they are trying to solve — our inability to let people die on the sidewalk in front of a hospital.
If you can come up with a way to make it acceptable for people without insurance to die in the streets because they can’t pay for their care, then we don’t have to worry about taxing them for the possibility of coverage later.
Otherwise, we are just giving them free health insurance through the government with other taxpayers paying for it while they get a free ride.
If you don’t want public health insurance, and you don’t want to mandate private coverage, you have to cut people off from free health care provided by the government.
Unfortunately, there isn’t even majority support in this forum for that sort of drastic action, nor would you ever get it through a congress elected by the people.
So if Romney runs in 2012 our choices will be what exactly? Bankruptcy or unaffordable health care? Oh yay!
BTTT
I think, while I can sympathize with your position, that you're missing the more important concept here - that the federal government is licensing to you permission to live. They like to say it's like mandatory auto insurance - government permits for driving is accepted, do you really want to give the government permission to license your ability to live?
That's the real problem here - government stepping into areas it was never intended to go. How on earth did our parents manage to pay for our medical bills when we were growing up? How did their parents manage the costs of broken bones and debilitating diseases.
We've removed free market from health care, and contrary to every conceivable economic theory in how to reduce costs, the federal answer is to hire more people to manage paperwork, under the theory that this will reduce costs.
Since labor costs are up, the only way to reduce the cost of health care is to reduce the quality and quantity of health care.
Another question that is hanging out there unanswered: Where the heck are all these doctors? In many urban areas, medical offices are at capacity. In rural areas, it's becoming increasingly impossible to find a general practitioner. General doctors are retiring faster than they are graduating, and the increasingly specialist nature of medicine will require ever increasing costs to maintain this very narrow focus.
For example, if you were an auto mechanic, and were really good at Range Rover undercarriages, and that's all you did, you'd probably charge more than anyone else as you need to make more money per visit than the auto shop next door that takes all makes and models. All fine and dandy for Range Rover owners, though, who have an option there, but for something, well, lower down on the economic scale, say a Pinto repairman, you'd still need to charge as much as the Range Rover specialist to stay in business.
The only answer to health care is to end HMOs and PPOs. Insurance is fine, if someone wants to buy it, but get all those layers upon layers of people out of the way, and tell them to go to medical school and become general practitioners, and the ‘medical crisis’ will be swiftly over with.