That’s not what I meant.
I wrote about this before but it’s worth repeating: You can’t require insurance companies to insure everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. Insurance companies would go out of business. To have universal coverage and require insurance companies to cover everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions, healthy people need to obtain policies as well to spread the risk out. If healthy people don’t get insurance and insurance companies have to cover sick people, costs will spiral out of control.
However, and this is the important part, the government should not force everyone to obtain health insurance. Doing so is just imposing a tax to fund a universal health care system in disguise.
That’s exactly what a Senate plan would do. People who choose to not buy health insurance would be fined.
What is this insanity? Is there no personal choice? No personal responsibility? Must the government take care of every aspect of our lives? What is happening to America?
The answer is interestingly enough, yes, the government indeed must take care of every aspect of our lives. That’s what government does; it grows and grows because of its fundamental incentive to expand power at the cost of individual freedom. America was lucky to start with a generally minarchist approach, but you’ll eventually fill even a bathtub using an eyedropper if you keep at it. Perhaps we’ll one day realize that using force to rob people of their choices never ends up well.