I confess I don't have health insurance

I wrote the following letter to the Wall Street Journal after it printed a good column on how ODE's fascist health insurance plan would simply be income redistribution.

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I have a confession to make. I don’t have health insurance. I’m evidently a statistic, along with 47 million of my fellow Americans. And I choose to be.

I am 49 years old. I eat nutritiously and do 7 hours of high-intensity workouts each week on a program called P90X. I have 8% body fat and the body of a 25-year-old athlete – so I guess that sort of makes me one of those healthy 20-somethings that the Obama administration plans to confiscate cash from to pay for those who don’t take care of themselves or don’t save money in case they have health issues in later life.

I stopped paying 5K-plus a year ago in catastrophic health insurance after I broke my nose playing basketball a year before and had to foot a $6,000 tab (I had 10K deductible to keep my premiums down). I negotiated with my nose doctor and the outpatient clinic to make payments for three years on the bill; they said yes, and I got my nose fixed, and I paid the bill off in less than a year.

I have been much more careful playing basketball since. This is what happens when you must pay your own health bills. I wasn’t reckless before, but perhaps I wasn’t as careful as I should’ve been with my inside-the-lane “power” layup. But recklessness is exactly what is happening in America today – and what will happen on a much greater scale if Mr. Obama proceeds with his violation of individual rights and his income redistribution, as was described by Michael Leavitt, Al Hubbard and Keith Hennessey.

Those of us who take great care of our bodies and are careful to avoid accidents will be forced at the point of a government gun to pay for those who abuse their bodies and blithely expose themselves to danger. This will create not a winter of discontent for those of us who are responsible; it will create a decade (or century) of discontent and a simmering anger at those who are visibly out of shape and reckless in public.