let's be honest here: "universal" health care means that health care is forced upon me whether I want it or not (or whether I want to pay for it or not).
To be fair, you can pay a fine instead, if you're desperately opposed to getting something for your money.
And if I refuse to pay, the police will come and make me pay at gunpoint, or take me to prison at gunpoint. Your *opinions* about what's best for me will be enforced with state-sanctioned violence. It can't be denied that these are merely your opinions. The issue is so phenomenally complex that intelligent people differ drastically. I, for one, find it extremely hard to believe that these 1200 pages, written by people who have no deep understanding of the problem, are the absolute best solution -- we can't even agree where the problem is. Since we can't be sure, this is a perfect example of where we need to respect liberty instead.
I'm not a free market fundamentalist
The entire rest of your post would seem to belie that.
Not correct. A market fundamentalist believes that markets should not be regulated. I believe markets must be regulated to protect property rights and the market mechanism. Like I said, markets aren't the solution to anything, self-ownership and property rights are.
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.)
Bitt, you obviously feel that people are too stupid to be entrusted with making choices on their own. Except for those who agree with you, of course, who should be empowered to make these decisions for all of us. Even a rushed, politically motivated and bureaucratic "solution" is better than nothing as far as you're concerned. In the 60's, Khrushchev called people who thought like that "helpful idiots", as he himself saw the economic disaster of socialism.
In addition to the profound arrogance of this position, I consider it evil. It's just complicated slavery. This attitude infantalizes people and eventually you become right -- they can't make decisions for themselves (or won't). These arrogant policies (and the right-wing equivalents!) deprive people of the right to become free, autonomous human beings.
Freedom and self-ownership (and hence property rights) are vastly more important than protecting society from the ridiculous and extreme examples you cited, or thousands like them. Freedom might be messy business, but I'll take it over a nice tidy prison any day. You obviously choose the prison, assuming of course that you get to be the warden. You don't want a republican-styled prison, but you don't object to a prison (for me) of your own design. You're going to continue to get your prison, incrementally, all the while blaming those nasty right-wingers who took away the civil liberties, never realizing you've done the same, only with different liberties.
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