To be fair, you can pay a fine instead, if you're desperately opposed to getting something for your money.


The entire rest of your post would seem to belie that.

What would happen if you decided that you weren't interested in the services of the fire department? Fair enough, your house burns down. But when it does, it burns down the rest of the houses around you. There's no way to prevent the spread of the fire without dousing your house. So we require that all people pay taxes to provide firefighting service, as it benefits us all.

Now what if you contracted tuberculosis? You've refused the health care insurance, and you can't pay for treatment. Besides, you just have a bad cough. So you just spread it around willy-nilly until someone realizes that there's a TB epidemic. In order to prevent its continued spread, you're treated for TB, at the taxpayer's expense. So we require that all people have health insurance so that, hopefully, you won't be reticent to get your cough taken care of early, and so that the taxpayer is not out of pocket. It benefits us all.

Obviously, that's a somewhat extreme example, but it scales down, too. You didn't get that toothache looked at, it developed into a full-blown infection, and now you're septic. You can't afford to see the doctor for that cold, so you went to work anyway and spread the flu to all of your coworkers. You declined the health insurance because you've never been sick a day in your life, and then you contract cancer, the treatment for which eats you out of house and home and you have to declare bankruptcy. Or even as simple as: you fell down and broke your arm, and now the emergency room has to set it for "free" because you couldn't pay. (Unless you want to argue that people with broken limbs or cancer who are unable to pay for their treatment should be turned away.)