This is a response to a comment posted by srcastic on Who's really uninsured? that I've promoted to a post.

I don't know about you specifically, but I was raised in a family of 4, in the eighties, with a yearly total household income of $30,000 or less. We usually had health insurance, but not always. The real issue, however, has nothing to do with how many people are uninsured in the US. The numbers could be 250m, or they could be 2.5m and it wouldn't make universal health care any more or less ethical of a proposition. You are right that it is foolish of me to post about this article, considering that it bears no relevance to the core argument against universal health care, but I always feel that confounding the scare tactics used by liberals to encourage the unbounded growth of government power is a positive thing.

The fact of the matter is that the responsibility of providing health care for a household falls only upon the adult members of that household and upon nobody else. At times when my family was uninsured, it caused stress, which, along with the real cost and risk of being uninsured, incentivized the adult members of the family to get insurance again ASAP. If you provide universal health care to people, you simply remove yet another incentive for people to become hard working, productive members of society. We've already put such a broad reaching safety net under people that they know that they need never be without food and shelter no matter how little they work, are we now going to add that they can also have unlimited access to our health care system no matter how little they actually contribute to society? That is offensive and abusive toward all of the productive members of society out there, yourself included.

You, hopefully, know just as well as I do that humans respond very readily to incentives for good behavior. They also respond very negatively to coercion. Universal health care is taking (through coercion) the value created by the most productive members of society and redistributing it to those who are less productive, without creating any incentive to those less productive members to become more productive. Actually, for the unproductive, it may incentivize unproductive behavior, because the costs of being unproductive are reduced, but the benefits (leisure time, etc.) are left unchanged. The direct result of these backwards incentives is that the society as a whole will produce less and ultimately that it will collapse.

Socialism, communism and their ilk do not work for a reason. Broken incentives is that reason. I am inclined to support universal health care at this point in the history of the US government because in doing so I would be hastening its downfall. Universal health care and other government expansion programs would have little impact on my real life in the near term and potentially offer the opportunity to truly explore the ideas of freedom that I espouse within my lifetime.