The Dubiousness of calling Mandated Insurance a "Tax".

Comments I made on http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/06/current_law_is_fiscally_respon.html":

Responding to: "Also if the government forces one to purchase health insurance at one's own expense that's effectively a tax. These off-balance sheet revenues and expenses ..."

Whoops -- you can, through some analogy call the requirement to purchase health insurance a "tax", but you cannot call it a source of (government) revenue.

OK, here's an idea for lowering the overall tax burden: Ban states from making car insurance mandatory!

OK, you can call mandated health, or car insurance a tax, and by the same reasoning, a (usually local government) requirement that you keep the sidewalk in front of your business ice free in winter is also a tax. Also, one way streets are a tax because under some circumstances, you could arrive at your destination faster and cheaper by going the "wrong way" (such authoritarian language!) up a one way street.

But, getting back to the ice on the sidewalks, it's a government imposed burden that will cost you money if you hire someone to do it. But then again, it might save you from a big lawsuit. Or the requirement that somebody else keep their sidewalk ice free might save you from a broken neck.

Health care can be expected to have some analogous effects. Is it fantastic that someone else's health could have a negative effect on you? not really. How about the part time school bus driver with no benefits who has a heart attack on his/her route that cholesterol lowering drugs might have prevented? How about the unpaid visits to the emergency room that hospitals no longer have to pass on to whoever they can find to subsidize them, when people stop using the ER in place of a family doctor. How about if the government, now able to show a financial benefit, requires procedures in hospitals that drastically cut MERSA and similar hospital spread infections (for which Medicare might pay hundreds of dollars a day for 3, 6, or 9 months (it's happenning in my own family). The cost/benefit effect alone could make it happen. And then along will come the "fringe benefits", like my father not being a deaths door for a time, and stuck in a chair or walker for months and months.

Lets just say there might be a reason the other wealth countries, with real health care systems, have half the financial burden of health care that we do, and mostly people better satisfied with the care they get.

"the cost of complying with the government regulations which have been growing like kudzu." Oh yes, the cost of complying with those pesky safety procedures for mines and oil rigs. The high cost of requiring Wall Street to sell financial instruments that people can understand. Terrible, terrible. Not to say that every government regulation is good - but neither can we assume they are all bad. We need to pay some attention to the arguments pro and con, not just have a rule "All regulation is _____ (a) good, (b) bad."