Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.
Here’s a comparison of US public subsidization of the costs of driving, from the same blog:
I'm responding to you, because this smacks of the same rhetoric I hear with schools: "Oh, all the non-parents have to subsidize the education of other people's kids?" Well, yes, those kids grow up and deliver your mail or treat your cancer.
For example, all Australian states and New Zealand have fuel excise / taxes where some types of fuel used for motor vehicles have significant extra taxes above normal cost. Some Australian states require drivers to pay an annual personal injury levy to a government department per vehicle (usually just shy of AU$1000/year in Victoria, for example), while others require private insurance covering personal injury. New Zealand has an accident compensation scheme that levies people based on the type of work they do (which factors in risk of work-related injury), and Australia (federally) also levies everyone for healthcare based on income and whether they have private insurance.
The main difference from the US is that medical care is socialised rather than the victims of road injuries (who are not necessarily drivers) subsidising drivers.
The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes.
If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance.
Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having to get very expensive treatment across all those employees.
You know what is the largest group available? All the citicens of the country in a single insurance plan. That is the point of maximum efficiency (least cost). As a bonus, you can remove all the middlemen of insurance companies, further increasing efficiency.
The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee.
So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer.
So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates.
But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company.
So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer.
So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.
I’m fine subsidizing people of a similar risk profile that have a hit by a bus moment. I’m not fine subsidizing the obese and chronically ill.
Your position would be considered deeply immoral by most people (rightly). Maybe spend less time on-line and interact with regular people.
We're on track for an annual deficit that exceeds everything but the 2020/2021 covid era. The politicians of the present are the issue.
It turns out that even broad consumption taxes in the guise of tariffs aren't enough to offset gigantic permanent tax breaks for the wealthiest.
Between his first term and his second term to date (2+ more years), Trump is responsible for more that one quarter (29%) of US debt (USD 11.6T / 40T):
* https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-bide...
There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.