[cpwright]

Car insurance doesn't protect you, it protects the other drivers on the road. You can decide to risk it, and if your brand new car is totaled, its on you [assuming you paid cash, if you finance it any lender will also make you get collision and comprehensive]. What you can't decide to do is forgo liability insurance so that if you hit someone else's car they have to extract the payment from you rather than from a well-capitalized insurance company.

Of course this is all state regulated (and this is US-centric, but so is Obamacare), so it can work differently in different places.

Health insurance nominally protects you, though some make the argument that it protects society as a whole from any individual burdening the system.

[gretful]

Put Drs/Hospitals/HealthCare in place of the other car, and your body in place of your car. The analogy works very well. ACA is acting as the bank in the car insurance analogy, demanding that you HAVE to have bumper-to-bumper collision insurance.

In the car insurance case you can forgo the car and thereby forgo purchasing car insurance, but with the ACA you can't forgo health insurance.