jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca writes:

I don't think that a reasonable person would argue that medical insurance should be outlawed because everyone should take care of their own needs. A social safety net is simply a form of health and life insurance. Statistical arbitrage if you will. By spreading the risk you minimize the cost. Yes, some people will take advantage of the system. But like a virus, a robust system should be able to withstand this form of attack.

It's too bad you received such fingers-in-the-ears libertarian-scream responses to this. You deserved a better answer than that. Not that I entirely agree. Let me quote part of something I once wrote on essentially this topic: "With *real* insurance it's tough enough to root out fraud. How can an unwritten, virtual policy, knowable only through deduction, addressing our entire circumstances of birth, that the insured may deny contracting to or may disagree about what the terms were, be easy to sort out?" Tom