Health Care
Everyone should have:
- the “right to be seen” when sick,
- the responsibility to pay for their own medical care if able,
- and the right to fair, continuous coverage at a fair price.
Such a system can be provided with well regulated private markets, as in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Moreover, there is a way to avoid an individual mandate. At the beginning, those reaching adulthood later, anyone can choose to opt out. But if they ever seek and obtain health care that they cannot pay for (directly or through an insurer): the provider may turn to a subsidized insurer for reimbursement; the individual is then mandated to be insured for life; and the individual pays a meaningful monthly penalty for having switched to rely on a system paid for by others but not themself. (Yes, I just wrote “themself.” Linguists increasingly recognize variants of this indefinite singular pronoun as the emerging standard.)
