Question about being "forced to purchase health coverage"

[BainsBane]

for a procedure you may not use. Isn't the requirement on the insurance company to offer a minimum baseline of insurance coverage? I would assume policies that don't cover maternity care, birth control, and other preventative measures no longer exist. Am I wrong? So what is all this angst about being "forced to purchase health coverage" for something you won't use? Isn't this a regulation of the insurance system so a basic level of care is mandated?

[NYC_SKP]

1. It's usually a teabagger argument that makes no sense.

Sometimes I'll read a protestation from someone on the left who refuses to send money to a corporate health care provider, but these are few and far between.

Virtually all insurance covers things that you aren't likely to use. We want to be covered for things in case they happen, not because we know they will.

And part of the social contract is that some of what we pay pays for others' needs, just as some of what others pay might pay for our needs.

It's the human and humane way to behave.

[BainsBane]

2. I would have thought so

but here we see the argument on DU.

[ScreamingMeemie]

3. It's become a vehemently argued point here on DU in the past 24 hours...

...and I never would have thought it from some of the people I see the argument from.

[BainsBane]

5. You'd think women alone made up the axis of evil

the way some carry on. Last I checked, we were all part of the same human race.

[SoCalDem]

4. Minimum standards are the law.. just pay the penalty if you do not need/want insurance

No one if forcing you to buy decent coverage..

I will never get prostate cancer, but my policy covers it.

[Xipe Totec]

6. I don't plan on getting sick. Nobody does.

But the whole purpose of health insurance is to distribute the risk among the population.

That's the whole premise. Some of us will get cancer, some heart disease, some will have other ailments, some will get run over by a car, some may never be sick until the day they keel over suddenly, or drown, or get abducted by aliens.

But the population as a whole has a statistical probability of getting cancer, or having heart disease, or etc., etc., etc... So based on those probabilities we calculate how much money we will spend on health care as a group, and we divvy up the cost evenly among us.

The luckiest among us are the ones who pay health insurance all their lives and never need it. The unlucky ones are the ones who do get sick and need to use it. The thoroughly screwed are the ones who end up sick but have no insurance because they thought they would never need it.

Can you imagine a world where we knew ahead of time what ailment we were going to suffer and then paid health insurance for that ailment only? Can you imagine what the premiums would be? Essentially, it would be a world where everybody paid for their own health care out of their own pocket. Or died because they could not afford the cost.

It would be exactly the same as having no health insurance at all.