[_heimdall]

I said this in a sibling comment, but when do we begin regulating other personal choices in the name of shared health care costs?

I see the problem there as being a society wholely dependent on a risk sharing insurance scheme, not any one particular factor that can raise rates.

Edit: its also worth noting that health insurance, and all insurance in the US unless I'm mistaken, is something you choose to use. You don't have to have health insurance at all, meaning you are choosing to take on the risk that others' decisions impact your rates and decided that is worth the benefits you gain from the coverage.

[czl]

> You don't have to have health insurance at all,

There are (or were) tax time penalties for failing to have healthcare coverage. Possible USA laws have changed recently.

[_heimdall]

I'm not sure if those were ever enforced, but I could be wrong. More importantly though, I disagree strongly with that rule when they either tried to, or did, implement and enforce it with the ACA.

[toss1]

>>when do we begin regulating other personal choices in the name of shared health care costs?

It Is Easy:

When those measures have been repeatedly and massively proven to be safe and effective to prevent both individual and especially mass illness, death, and costs.

When you can count the dead by the millions in the graveyards before the measures were taken, and cannot fine one in a million even plausibly "injured" by those measures that literally save society. Pasteurization and vaccination are two examples that come to mind.

Have you ever visited a pre-1900 graveyard? The majority of graves are children. Children who died from the same diseases that are easily prevented by vaccines. Any parent back then would have praised God for the miracle of vaccines. The TYPICAL family had close to a dozen children and was lucky if two survived to adulthood. Same for Pasteurization.

Even raising the question (nevermind twice) shows a deep ignorance of the subject, but a clear willingness to spew ignorant 'takes'. Yikes.

EVERY modern society is effectively built on risk-sharing and specialization. It is also built on cooperation. You don't get to be free to be a complete asshat, or malingantly ignorant and still enjoy the benefits of society. Get over it or go enjoy some remote corner of Siberia.

[_heimdall]

This opens up of a very deep can of worms that can't reasonably be discussed in a forum like this. You have to define safe and effective, and unless its 100% of both you have to find some "good enough" line for people to agree with and that is quite often the sticking point.

[toss1]

No, unless you can not count, it is entirely reasonable to discuss even in short-form forums like this.

For a modern complex civilized society to continue to exist, everyone must make accommodations.

Demanding absolute perfection and zero issues with those accomodations, as you are doing by handwaving about "define" and "100%", is what is unreasonable.

When the lives saved are in the billions, enough to cause a population explosion fundamentally change the structure of society such that e.g., women no longer need to have a dozen kids to have one or two children make it to adulthood, and the safety is so good it takes massive studies to even identify possible marginal issues in one in several million vaccinated, and the consequences of not requiring simple accommodations like taking a vaccine (w/obvious medical bona-fide exceptions) or quarantining to prevent a pandemic or outbreak of a deadly disease, there is no reasonable debate. It is reasonable to require such things to participate in the society.

The people refusing are simply freeloading on the herd immunity and healthcare system built and maintained by their smarter and more conscientious peers.