when society has to pick up the healthcare cost of those without insurance, it's reasonable to require insurance.
I think this is true. I can't necessarily get behind the way they are implementing it, but it really is like having a car. You can hurt others by not taking care of yourself. If you don't have insurance it impacts the people who do and the taxpayers as well.
If it is really were a choice, then if you get very sick or injured without insurance you need to die to stay honest. No one really believes in that though.
Instead everyone else pays one way or another. It can be transparent or completely opaque. Fact is they do pick homeless people off the street that have heart attacks and give them free bypass surgery which then gets passed along to both taxpayers and insurance companies.
Right now the costs are both opaque and inflated because you are not paying for just your own care. You are paying for people that don't have insurance and are getting healthcare. They are trying to get people to pay in who are not right now, but are capable of it. There are more of those than you think.
I do absolutely agree with being able to compare health plans and buy across state lines to increase competition and free market prices. This may be the only thing I totally agree with though.
Also I don't know enough about the system to say what the cutoff should be, but the 80% of money going to payouts makes sense to me. A company should not be able to increase profits by denying legitimate claims. That is like not showing up for work and getting paid more that day.
If you don't think the costs are inflated because of the invisible items, all you have to do is look at something like plastic surgery. People pay out of pocket for those surgeries, and they are quite frankly cheaper than similar necessary surgeries. Prices are based on what people can pay and competition, not all of the other hidden costs.
Again, I don't agree with everything about Obamacare, but there are underlying systemic problems with the way things are. I do think that more healthy people = more tax money and fewer charity cases.