Forcing people to buy insurance is stupid.

One of the biggest mistakes in the recently passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare) is the Individual Mandate that requires most US citizens to have health insurance or pay a tax penalty.

The idea of requiring someone by law to opt into insurance programs is silly at best. The government requires that people buy auto insurance or pay a fine. They say that this is necessary for public safety reasons, but bear in mind, these are the same people who willfully ignore the 40,000 people per year who die on their roads and highways and instead of taking responsibility, would rather pin the blame on proximate causes instead of the ultimate cause. Now how does auto insurance encourage people to drive safely? It doesn't, especially when the government protects the insurance companies' bottom line by requiring the people to buy a product they either don't want or can't afford.

Insurance companies and other corporations will use Individual Mandates to milk the system dry of resources that could have been better allocated elsewhere. How can they do this? Because through an Individual Mandate, corporations and firms don't get their money directly from the consumer anymore, they get their money through a third party entity, like insurance companies, and because they don't get their money from the consumer anymore, they can increase the cost of their services to their customers, and they can do this without jeopardizing their customer base because their customer base is guaranteed to them by the government in the form of the Individual Mandate.

Auto Insurance that is required by law discourages people from driving safely. Why is that? Because if you get into an accident, chances are you're not paying for the damages. The insurance company is. It's the same with healthcare. Mandated health insurance discourages people from being careful about their own health, thus more people get sick or injured, thus costs go up, thus quality of healthcare goes down, all the while corporations get richer... oh and the fact that most states won't let you buy health insurance across state lines doesn't help. The government pretty much hands the insurance companies a monopoly and you wonder why there are people out there who oppose government regulation and interference in the free-market.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the Individual Mandate is a good thing. The article points out that many experts have been arguing for an Individual Mandate for years, but I would argue that anyone who argues for an Individual Mandate are economic illiterates who aren't to be taken seriously. If the current pattern of Mandated Insurance keeps up, eventually our society is going to become so stupid in regards to their health, we'll have to teach people how to use an inhaler for asthma.

Hopefully, the new Congress repels the abomination the idiots who put it together call HEALTHCARE REFORM, but I don't have my hopes up on that happening.