When My car gets sick my insurance don’t pay for it! .

Wonder if govt will want to take over AUTO insurance companies next! I wouldn’t be surprised. We will all be driving around in smashed up Hybrids and Smart cars in 10 years! Wait maybe by then we will have Sharia law so govt will chop off our arms and we can’t drive at all!!!!

Well, your body is certainly more important than your or anyone else’s car. Wait…

while i’m for and against obamacare.. i do have to say the flaw in that argument is requirement of auto insurance is a STATE thing, not a govornment thing.. don’t like the law, move to another state.

I pay for mine not yours !!!! Nice spin lib!!!!

People don’t HAVE to drive. You can bike, you can walk, you can take a cab or you can take public transportation.

Mandatory Health Insurance would be like Government requiring you to have “walking” or “breathing” insurance. OMG, you can’t walk or breath unless you pay the Government to do so.

Not everyone owns a car. You only have to purchase auto insurance if you own one, which is a privalege not a right. Yet EVERYONE now has to purchase health insurance or pay fines and got to jail.

Aside from that minor detail it’s exactly the same.

I only have to buy car insurance for myself and I certainly don’t have to buy it from the government.

If I chose not to drive I wouldn’t have to have insurance. With mandated health insurance there is no choice. What can you do, choose not to live.

The phrasing of your question is explicitly biased, but here goes anyway.

I do protest auto insurance laws, ( I also would always carry it).

No one is forcing you to own & drive an auto, no one is attempting to eventually force you to own government auto insurance. Mr, Obama is on record as saying he eventually wants single payer health care**. If I don’t like State Farm I can switch to Geico, or take the bus and not pay any should I choose.

Actually , the health care plan will force you to buy insurance if you cannot find a way for ME to pay for it for you. There is no FREE Health care.

Good grief…how many times has this question been asked and answered.

Driving isn’t a right – it is a privilege – therefore the States (not the federal government) have the right to create laws that people must follow in order to enjoy the privilege.

Apples and oranges. You don’t want to pay auto insurance, take the bus.

My auto insurance pays for MY car…..not everybody else’s.
I have a CHOICE of auto insurance companies and plans…….not a “one plan fits all” forced government run plan.

Sorry dude…..but your auto vs. health analogy fails……But please, try again.

You draw a very good analogy. While insuring an auto is quite different from insuring your health, there is a common principle. Both Obamacare and auto insurance (assuming you drive) are mandatory with some exclusions [1]. While conservatives may not be protesting mandatory auto insurance, they should be considering its impacts as well since we have many years of experience. Alas, like the frog that fails to jump out of a pot of water that is slowly heated to boil, so we fail to perceive the impacts of greater central control. I will suggest how mandatory auto insurance has impacted us.

1) Obviously, insurance companies have benefited to the degree that more people have purchased auto insurance than would have otherwise. This same criticism is raised against Obamacare. I really don’t see how you can argue against the obvious interest that insurers have to penalize people who refuse to buy their products.

2) Because virtually every auto damaged through accident is covered by insurance premiums, there is a subsidy to businesses that repair auto body damage. We could imagine that, if insurance were not as ubiquitous, people might actually drive more cars that have cosmetic defects. So what?!? What’s more, might auto manufacturers have constructed cars that were more solid if fewer people carried insurance? Would such cars have been safer [2]?

3) On the other side, we can imagine that the frequency of uninsured injury would have been greater. While people can and do (!) purchase insurance that covers them in the event that a loss occurs in an accident with an uninsured driver (despite the law), I readily conceed that you might see more accidents in which neither driver was insured. If a serious injury occured, who would pay the costs for medical treatment? Apart from the savings of the people involved, I imagine that medical insurance and personal liability insurance, for those who carry those coverages, would step up to cover some of these additional claims. However, there certainly would be people with neither savings nor insurance coverage caught in a bad situation. Alas! Someone would have to step in to voluntarily assist these people (if no one else, some doctor) or else they would suffer additional pain and perhaps even die.

This last argument may seem compelling, but it invites an argument ad nauseum. If we are to pre-emptively protect people from the consequences of life, what is there to not protect. It is also true that people sometimes die without leaving a “sufficient” amount of life insurance to care for their dependents. Should we also mandate life insurance coverage? The insurance companies would love it, but I would be concerned that we would soon be destroying the benefits of insurance and forging a backdoor to socialism [3].

When it comes down to it, you may explicitly want to go through the door to socialism. We shouldn’t be afraid to debate out loud the implications of taking that door. The fact is that mandatory auto insurance *was* a small step toward that door. Mandatory health insurance would, in my opinion, be a much bigger step. But you can not justify the next step just because the last one was taken. Conservatives may not have the insight to challenge even auto insurance, since it is now an established practice. They should though.

After having written this lengthy essay (thanks, if you suffered through it), I will concede what you may have wanted to see. The world did not end with mandatory auto insurance. Nor would it end with mandatory health insurance. Practically speaking, we are almost there anyway due to run-away medical costs. You either have health insurance or you eventually find yourself coming under assistance. I see the mandatory aspect of Obamacare as nothing more than serving the insurance industry under the cover of reform. It won’t change much. If it did, there is a good chance that someone would complain loud enough to negatively impact the political landscape.