I assume you've based this conclusion on your extensive experience reading noncompetes from many different verticals in many different markets, and not just what the average tech worker sees.
> The whole "pre-existing" condition FUD is crap, too, since the new healthcare bill doesn't do away with that "protection".
No, it simply makes it impossible to take advantage of any protections by allowing insurance companies to charge any price they deem fit to the most vulnerable patients.
> Americans badly need any replacement that might control costs better.
I don't disagree with you here, but neither does the AHCA. And its glaringly obvious to anyone that knows healthcare policy well that the ACA has plenty of room to be adjusted to correct inadequacies. The "Repeal and Replace" mantra on the far right is just political gamesmanship. If Republicans really cared about free markets, they would have brought to the table measures that helped create an educated market, like pricing transparency and enforcing laws against anticompetitive behavior.
> I should add that I don't think it is fair that un-insurable people push their problems onto the rest of us because all that does is bring everyone down! It's nice to think we can look out for our nation's most vulnerable people, but what if we can't do that and maintain viable economic growth? What then?
Man, I gotta hand it to you, this is some Grade A supertrolling here. In the span of just a few sentences you've managed to combine fear, a begrudged sympathy, and a false dichotomy into what passes for an argument, flimsy though it is.
Maybe read up on the idea of the veil of ignorance[1] for that first point. Had you put it a different way I might agree with you in principle—we should stop talking about healthcare as insurance and start talking about how to provision healthcare for everyone. Its not insurance when everyone is guaranteed to need it at some point in their lives. There's nothing in doing so that demands we limit economic growth—the US is for all intents and purposes the only developed country in the world that fails achieve this.