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Who Pays for Health Care?
...Shorter Dean Baker: Healthy people need to be required to pay for the health care of the sick. Typically, this is phrased a little more delicately –”people working together to provide affordable health care for everyone” or the like. But no, these days, folks like Baker and Ezra Klein just come right out and say it: If you’re healthy and don’t want to pay insurance premiums, too bad! The government needs to come and make you pick up the tab.

Universal health care advocates like to talk about the issue in moral terms, but the moral logic here seems extremely questionable. Forcing healthy people to open up their checkbooks whenever someone else gets sick seems mighty questionable. Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I wonder how popular insurance mandates and other requirements would be if, say, top-tier political candidates explained the policy on similar terms...