The significant point you are missing is that today you have a choice. You could go buy insurance from someone else. Someone who provides better coverage. Now you may have to pay more for it to get the coverage you want, but you do have that choice. You decide the risk your willing to take and how much additional out of pocket your willing to spend. How much deductible your willing to shoulder. Tomorrow that choice goes away. You will pay whatever taxes you have to and get the coverage a Washington bureaucrat decides you and everyone else needs. Your freedom of choice goes away. But your payment will be whatever someone decides you can afford (taxes) and your coverage will be what ever they decide they want to give you. You are very naive to think it will be a better system when everything else the government tries to do is a mess. Think about how great our postal service is, but yet UPS and FedX can build a huge business based on how poor they perform. And that started long before e-mail hit their business.