The government is not inherently more honest. We've had to implement tax laws in the past because politicians were raiding municipal fund assets to fulfill campaign promises or quell unhappy citizens. These funds were designated for a specific purpose, such as funding healthcare for municipal employees. Those funds were to be set aside for healthcare, but the mayor says "hey, there's a lot of money there, I'll borrow some of it now to fund that new pool opening that the people have been clamoring for and pay it back later". Politicians are good at stealing from Paul to pay Peter, heck, it may be why we elect them. To rely on their judgement of when, why, and to what degree you steal from Paul to pay Peter. Our current U.S. government redistributes 66% of tax revenue in the form of "services". The argument becomes, what is an "essential government service"? Most of us consider police and trash pickup as essential. Is welfare, food stamps, medicaid, social security, etc... "essential". We vote on that. Allowing the government to control the distribution of healthcare via tax revenue would, in theory, allow the political will of the day rule how much is taken from Paul (higher tax brackets) to pay for Peter (lower tax brackets). If this is good or not, I don't know But it is in line with U.S. democratic ideal.
Its not perfect, but at least its a position that attempts to satisfy the dual desires of egalitarian coverage and the option to purchase more coverage if you wish to do so. Most people don't want to prevent poor people from recieving care and think that a non wealthy person is entitled to the same treatment options as the wealthy. BUT we don't want to prevent the wealthy from purchasing more coverage if they chose to do so. We can't cover everyone at the level a wealthy person would choose to cover herself at. If you think we can, I'd like to know how we pay for it since your proposing most of our tax dollars will go towards health coverage. Why health coverage over education? I'd like to know why it's fair to force subsidization. Basically your saying its a crime to be wealthier than anyone else. Why not just rob the rich folks who you detest? Go ahead and rob them by force. If you go about it this way, via punative taxes, your just trying to steal in a cowardly manner. I don't think we should encourage "egalitarianism" as a moral disguise to the cowardly theft. But if that is the political will, at least its better than violent revolution.
Addressing the problem of rising costs: One of the reasons our healthcare system is failing is due to the choice young people have to not buy health insurance. One of the main goals of my healthcare plan is to force young people to join the ride, to force them to bite the bullet and subsidize those who are not as young and healthy. P.S. our cost statistics associated with healthcare will look better once healthy young people who don't need any healthcare services are forced into the mix. We'll have a larger denominator (in math terms).
The real benefit would be data collection so that we can have data to tackle the problem of rising healthcare costs. Our delivery system prevents us from having great data. We must make sure everyone is insured so we can get complete data. We don't force subsidization out of moral arguments.
Anyway, the main problem towards implementing this is that you MUST get everyone to pay for healthcare. How do you force someone to buy health insurance and have them like it? States force you to purchase auto insurance, BUT the reason is because you can directly cause harm on someone else. That "direct harm" argument is difficult to do with health care.
Try selling the idea. Its hard. Consider this company that was running with 2 different risk pools. They had an HMO plan and their self funded PPO plan. The young healthy people went into the PPO plan (the plan required high copays). The HMO had all the bad risk high utilizers (due to low copays). This became a huge problem. They looked at merging risk pools. The young people were not happy. In combining the two populations into one HMO, this would cost the young folks quite a bit more money, to the tune of about $200 per month per single man/woman. How do you deliver this message? Hiding it in tax law is probably the easiest way. For companies, they do not have this luxury.
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