Ayaan wrote:Well, I suppose that makes me a thief. I have health insurance through work. I can guarantee that the charges for couple of visits to my rheumatologist with all the bloodwork (they draw between four and ten test tubes of blood since some values are checked every three months, others twice a year, and some once a year) costs more than I pay in premiums each year - and I see my rheumatologist at least four times a year and my primary care doctor two or three times a year. My out-of-pocket costs are negligible. Don't get me started on my prescription coverage - one month's supply of prescriptions retails for more than my premiums cost me in three years.piscator wrote:Seth wrote:
It's the latter, which means you are either stealing from someone elses paycheck or they are stealing from yours.
Insurance is just like that. They may call it "Voluntary", but it's about as voluntary as driving...
All I can say is I'm glad we have Insurance Regulators on the taxpayer's tab!
Yet, insurance companies still manage to make billions every year. There can't be that many people each year who don't use their insurance.
Seth's rhetorical use of "Theft" hinges on his even more rhetorical definition of "Voluntary" . See, a person would voluntarily pay private road owners just to leave his home in a Libertarian World, but the same act of leaving the house on Marxist public roads amounts to theft, because wage earners and businesses are compelled to pay taxes on fuel purchases by the thermonuclear armed might of the State.
And so it is with insurance. A person who needs insurance to operate his farm is volunteering to monitor your hemoglobin when he throws a dart at a board and picks the same system of for-profit insurers, reinsurers, HMOs, and pharma companies as you, but he is compelled by thermonukes when his government does the same thing objectively better and for less of his money.
Remember, all forms of Governmental compulsion, from a simple street crosswalk to the pure atheistic Marxist killing fields of Pol Pot, are thefts of your labor. And as such, crimes.