What's your plan if you go into the doc, TBT, and he tells you, "It appears you have a malignant lump in your brain. Surgery and treatment will cost $350,000, and will give you a 70% chance of regaining a normal life." You have $350k cash? Okay, then add a million to it. Got that much cash? And if not? Your plan will have to be one of two things: 1) emergency room treatment at enormous taxpayer expense; or 2) die. Plus bankruptcy, and stiffing your creditors, so that goes onto the back of the taxpayers too, in the form of increased costs that your creditors have to charge to cover the losses you just created.
It's *cheaper* if we give everyone health insurance, because then we'll catch things early, when they cost $5k to fix, instead of not even knowing about the problem until the taxpayer has to eat $200k in costs via emergency room treatment.
The "pray I don't get sick" plan (if you want to call it that) works for some people. But for those it doesn't, we all pay a very steep price for that in increased costs passed along to everyone.
Now, if we eliminate the emergency room treatment of the needy (and just let TBT die instead of attempting costly treatment UNLESS he coughs up the cash FIRST), well, that would save some money. We'd all have to be willing to watch video of dying people being turned away from hospitals. Obviously, some of them would be children too. I'm not sure how long that would go on before someone said, "Hey, ya know, just letting people die because they lack cash...is this really who we are as a people?"
