[sflicht]

So why not explicitly pass a subsidy (e.g. through the tax code) for the chronically ill? Disguising such transfers through regulatory costs is both inefficient and dishonest. It's also very unclear whether society would choose to subsidize all sick people. For example, those who are sick and rich enough to afford their insurance premiums (or who were lucky enough to obtain long-term coverage before they got an expensive medical condition, so their premiums are low), might not merit such transfers. If women have higher expected lifetime health costs due to pregnancy-related care, society might or might not want to have healthcare-related subsidies that amount to a transfer payment from men to women.

The proper way to make these sorts of decisions is by passing laws that make the transfer payments explicit, not disguising them in byzantine insurance regulations.

[eru]

You are right in some theoretic sense.

Alas, politics is the art of the possible, and hypocrisy is a valuable tool.