There's that key word again . . . volunteer.
One problem with your post here is that your making a comparison between events/circumstances that do not necessarily correlate well. A "house fire" and a "lost child in the woods" are two events that occur extremely infrequently and therefore don't require an enormous commitment of resources on an ongoing basis. This is why, for example, such rescue missions are staffed predominantly by volunteers -- and why most municipalities in the U.S. have volunteer fire departments. Basic medical care, on the other hand, is rendered with such boring regularity that it doesn't even make sense to call a medical insurance policy "insurance" at all.
If there was such a thing as “rescue insurance”, the only way to get people to buy it would be to force them to, since at this point rescue is a free service donated by government and private citizens. We essentially have universal rescue insurance, paid for by our tax dollars.
Not always. In Alaska, for example, there has been a strong push (and this may have even been implemented) to require some form of "rescue insurance" for anyone who tries to climb Mount McKinley. Basically, hikers would have to post a $50,000 bond to cover the cost of a potential rescue -- or they wouldn't be permitted to climb the mountain. This is exactly what happens when the dire event/circumstance in question happens with enough frequency that it becomes a pain in the @ss for the government to adress the problem free of charge.
If “rescue” is too much of a unique thing for you, just substitute the fire department. We don’t have private companies that will come put your fire out, we pay taxes (required insurance premiums) to get public fire departments (mandatory insurance) since when our house in on fire, nobody is going to let it just burn down (let the treatable patient die) when we can stop it. And that’s even though most people HAVE fire insurance that will pay to rebuild whatever is lost.
The original purpose of a fire department was not to keep your house from burning down . . . it was to keep everyone else's house from burning down, too. That's why paid, fully-staffed fire departments are almost always found in urban areas or places with a lot of industrial land uses where fires can be devastating to the public at large and not just the owner/occupant of the property where the fire originates.
OK, great response. Some of that I anticipated.
You are absolutely correct, most of our “health insurance” isn’t insurance at all, but simply prepaid purchases. I buy dental insurance and go to the dentist twice a year, obviously part of my insurance premium is just pre-paying those visits. For more money I get coverage for orthodontics, so I grab the higher coverage when my kids get to that age and I prepay the orthodontics.
BTW, I do that because the insurance company has bargained down costs below what I can easily get, or else I’d just pay the bills directly.
But part of health insurance is catastrophic care, care that if not performed would lead to death. Nobody would be that upset if uninsured people had to suffer more from colds and flu, or went a few days with an ear infection because they couldn’t get treatment.
It’s the permanent disability and death that we are fighting about.
Your comment about Mt McKinley is also a great one. If you don’t buy the insurance, you can’t climb. That’s MANDATORY INSURANCE. IT’s what someone noted a while ago though, climbing a mountain is a choice, as is driving. If you don’t by health insurance, do they simply not let you live?
What if they had insurance for climbing, but you could waive it. Then if you got lost, you are on your own, too bad.
After a few years, a group of boy scouts gets lost. Turns out they were from the inner-city, and their families were poor, and couldn’t afford the insurance, so they waived it.
Too bad, they all die? No way. We send the rescuers out. We aren’t going to win that one. And since we DO rescue them, the 10 inner-city groups that slaved to RAISE the money last year won’t make THAT mistake again.
If we could have a plan where you could waive health insurance in exchange for NEVER getting any government health care if you get sick, that would work, but it wouldn’t “stick”. In the end we’d pay for them anyway.
And while I mentioned volunteers, it’s also paid forces. We have a mix of paid and volunteer fire personnel. And fires are rare, but so is cancer, and heart attacks, and a lot of the more expensive medical care.
Medical care is a very complex problem. I don’t think we do it justice to simply attack someone like Romney for his approach, because the sound bites trivialize the problem and are unimplementable.
As to your comment about keeping “everybody else’s house from burning down”, even if true (not so much I think today) it’s still the same thing, we don’t make each OTHER homeowner hire a private company to protect them from the house fire spreading, we have the government do that.
It’s not like we think the original house fire is obviously the homeowner’s fault and therefore they deserve to have their house burn down, but the next door neighbor “did nothing wrong” and therefore we should spend tax dollars to save him.
It’s that we decided as a society that society is better off if we don’t let things burn down, and we decided to spend tax dollars to protect from that, even for a single house.