Well that is where reality comes charging in. Hospitals that accept federal funds cannot turn patients away in their emergency rooms. Now I can whine until I get sick of my own voice about that, but it won't do a hill of beans of good cause that will never change. Never. So, we have to address how we can stem costs to the taxpayer.
Let me tell you something about actuarial tables and the personal responsibility crowd. Oh wait, my bad -- I don't need too. MA was bailing hospitals out to the tune of $1 billion plus a year (with NO way of capping or controlling those costs). That pretty much represents how "responsible" those folks are. Of course actuarial tables provide you with data for young adults who actually have insurance, not really giving you the breakdown of those who get freecare every year, which include college students and those already in the workforce. (Why "successful young adults" is referenced in your post is intriguing. Is it your assertion that only the successful young adults be given the choice to forego coverage?).
You can also look to how much MA consumers pay on their auto insurance premiums. You see a huge population of "personal responsibility" residents of NH (the state that says it's all you baby, no auto insurance necessary) travel to MA to work. They get into car accidents. No insurance. No actual demonstration of personal responsibility to pay for the loss, or the resulting injuries to those "successul young adults" who are also personally responsible as the actuarial tables told them to roll the dice, you don't need insurance cause bad things don't happen to young successful people.
The knock on the door you are hearing is reality paying a visit cause someone has to pay -- as you know as sure as I am typing this that those "successul young adults" aren't going to pass up the EMT placing them in the ambulance. I wonder who will foot the bill for that? It's a mystery....
As long as their are people around like yourself, who care more about pragmatism than rightness when it comes to voting (or anything else, I'd wager), then you're probably correct, such things won't ever change. (Interesting, though, that a self-identified conservative would be such a pragmatist, given that pragmatism is an explicitly left-wing political philosophy, held by such notables as Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Mussolini.)
Now if, instead of winding up with a candidate like John McCain because of your pragmatist ilk, the people who have a conviction or two became the majority in the GOP, leading to the nomination of a Hunter or a Tancredo - or yes, even a Ron Paul - then the country might stand a chance on getting on the right track.
Given that you've amply demonstrated you don't know a damned thing about actuarial science, whereas I'm studying to become an actuary, even if your malformed ramblings had expressed a coherent thought, I would have ignored it anyhow, given that it is almost certainly wrong. By way of example - the data which are used to create actuarial tables are not taken merely from the set of insured persons but from statistics of all sorts, such as casualty and mortality data, police reports, etc.
And your conclusion - that the previous debt due to uninsured patients is indicative of the irresponsibility of all who choose to forego coverage - is fallacious. I've been uninsured for three years now - which would make me a criminal in your state - and I've never once incurred a medical bill which I've not paid. This is in part due to the fact that, being a member of the demographic I mentioned, successful young adults, I'm far less likely than a member of any other demographic to need medical care. That isn't to say that only successful young adults should have the choice of declining health insurance - I think everyone should have that choice - but only that they are the prime example of a demographic for which it can be a good choice. If you had so much as half a functioning brain, my referrencing of that demographic wouldn't be "intriguing," it'd be plain common sense.
As far as auto insurance, if you're uncomfortable with the prospect of driving on roads with uninsured drivers while feel-good laws prohibit you from recovering all your losses, you've got a bit of a problem. I doubt New Hampshire is willing to curtail the liberty of its residents, which means that if you want to have a level playing field (i.e. not see those outrageous premiums) you're going to have to increase liberty in your state, something which I know is an anathema to you personally. In the long term, you'll have to work at changing those afore-mentioned feel-good laws so that you can recoup your losses by taking the causal agent of the accident's home, other car, the shirt off his back, his dog, and his liver if need be. THAT is personal responsibility. True personal responsibility is impracticable under the current system, which encourages and abets moral hazard (if you don't know the term, look it up - it probably doesn't mean what you think) - so to critisize the advocates of personal responsibility for hypocrisy makes little sense.
In the short term, just get comprehensive coverage. Was that so hard?
