Note that, politically, there is no problem collecting higher premiums for tobacco use. But apparently alcohol was not politically unpopular enough to be a factor allowed when pricing an individual’s insurance premiums. Or vaccination status.
A known cost of socialized medicine.
Unless you want to go down the road of justifying any government coercion or loss of freedom as a taxpayer cost saving measure.
> but requiring taxes to cover the negative externalities from vice is fine, e.g. funding DUI checkpoints).
Is not as simple as it may sound.
It seems prudent to just treat all monies paid to the federal government as taxes, and all services/products received from the federal government as a whole when accounting for it as an individual taxpayer.
Some states sort of do this by requiring purchase of personal injury protection (PIP) from the auto insurer.
Really, anything can be a slippery slope if we want to look at it through that lens, but it's often not appropriate. This is one of those cases.