Why do you care if I'm insured? (From the Health Care Blog)

Interesting article I found at the Health Care Blog website. It asks and answers, "Why should you care if I'm insured?" I think its an interesting perspective to consider....

Why do you care if I'm insured? by John Goodman

If you care a great deal, I’ll give you an account number you can use to make a deposit.

[Note to Self: Send this Alert to the folks at Commonwealth. Also to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. CC Uwe Reinhardt as well. You never know what they might do. They certainly talk about this topic a lot.]

While you’re thinking about the initial question, here are a few follow-up questions:

Do you care whether I have life insurance?

What about disability insurance?

Homeowner’s insurance?

Auto casualty?

Auto liability?

What about retirement insurance? (A pension or savings plan.)

Do you care whether I keep my money at an FDIC-insured institution?

Or whether I bought an extended warranty on my car?

Or whether I bought travel insurance before taking my scuba diving trip to Palau?  (It pays off if you get sick and can’t go.)

I’m sure there are busybodies who would like to run everyone else’s life. But society as a whole has taken a more rational approach. We basically don’t care whether people insure to protect their own assets (at least we don’t care enough to make them do so). But we do care about events that could create external costs for other people.

Through Social Security, we force people to pay for life insurance benefitting dependent children (who could potentially become wards of the state) but not for a working-age spouse. All but three states force people to have auto liability insurance (covering harm to others) but not casualty insurance (covering one’s own car). We basically don’t care whether people insure their own homes, but we force them...

Read the rest of the article here...