You can still by supplemental insurance, so they aren't regulating what you can have, they are regulating the minimum floor.
This is utter nonsense on its face. If I have (or want) something under the minimum floor, they have regulated that away from me. They have regulated what I can have.
Then there is ethics.
Ethics and choice matter. Even if there were startling net benefits to this very toxic substance, using or ingesting it should be exclusively on an individual basis: personal choice, OTC, or per a physician. Advocating for needlessly and forcefully "medicating" (read: it's not medicine) other people through their communal water supply is, in no uncertain terms, blatantly unethical. It seems to stem from either psychopathy, greed, or sheer ignorance. It's on the same order as an industry and some physicians promoting nicotine cigarettes for health, once upon a time, and other such barbarities of an era.
Some of this is because to be a medicine, a substance sort of needs to have a noticeable effect on our biology.
I'll rephrase. It isn't good medicine.
Fluoride treatments and water fluoridation are medicines like mercury treatment was once medicine. Explicit forms of "medication" must be relegated solely to an individual's active consent when consent is possible. That means a conscious choice to partake in the "medicine," on or in one's body, without medicating other people in the treatment. That's basic ethics. The benefit:negative ratio would have to be astronomically high to justify any less standard where medicine is concerned.
Medicine is very personal. Speaking for myself, when an extremely toxic substance to humans, no matter the dose, is intentionally added to something as important as water and thus a food chain, it has already lost the ethical equation. Massively "medicating" passive "patients" through the water supply is just sad. Worse still, ingesting fluoride hasn't been justified on any beneficial, medical level -- and quite the opposite with negatives. Thus, it's hard for me to associate the term "medicine" with it. I completely concede to that point though.
How you treat others and yourself is up to you, of course. Beyond your personal choices, you'll then have a titanic task of providing basis for your support of fluoride as a medicine to the point where you justify medicating the rest of your community through its water supply.
That horribly toxic chemical chlorine is added to water too. It is significantly more toxic than sodium fluoride. It also happens to be responsible for the greatest improvement in public health in the 20th century.
Sane countries banned fluoridation long ago.
Most countries who don't fluorinate water didn't ban it. They simply never implemented it or stopped implementing it because it is quite expensive and technically difficult to do well. Instead many simply add fluoride to their table salt (like France, Germany, Switzerland) or heavily pushed topical fluoride applications. The countries that have neither (like say Japan), tend to have significantly worse dental health than the US.
Meanwhile, there is no hard, double-blind science backing any clear benefits of fluoridation
You must be kidding. We have long-term longitudinal studies that clearly show the benefits and safety. Every decade, someone puts out a review paper[1] of the studies and comes to the same conclusion, fluoridation at low levels is good. We have scientific consensus that it is beneficial.
1. http://www.nature.com/ebd/journal/v9/n2/full/6400578a.html
Fluoridation, alternatively, is not easy to remove. Fortunately, I can afford distillation and reverse osmosis. Many other people can't. I'm not sure why you're so eager to medicate the water supply when more studies, decade after decade, present more negatives. Positive fluoride studies are notorious for conflating correlation with causation, especially in light of the more direct causation of cultural advances in education for merely brushing teeth as well as access to dental care. There is a lack of evidence showing significant variance in dental caries between fluoridated and non-fluoridated municipalities. That should alarm you. Fluoride accumulates. For whatever reason, you don't seem interested in its negatives.
Again...
Even if there are light or even startling benefits, it does not make valid the ethics of mass medication. You may feel strongly about wanting everyone to have fluoride. I suggest voicing your pro-fluoridation stance in a more positive way rather than advocating it be done through a water supply where it's very hard to remove, and compounds. Maybe advocate for "free fluoride tablets" and fluoride-filled toothpaste if you must. Don't include others in your treatment.
Under the new health insurance law, the penalty for not buying health insurance is a fine. I forget the yearly amount: $500-1000 (depending)? Yes, that's a form of force. The amount of the fine and who it impacts is the amount of force. It's economic taxation. It also further opens up a slippery slope in the ability for such forms of force to be used increasingly in other aspects of government and society. That's another topic.
Both propositions are easily argued as forms of force. They could easily be argued as unjustified compared to other systems and methods. However, for now, I'd argue that contaminating water is a larger form of force.
Have healthcare system where costs are externalized? People complain. Have healthcare system where costs are internalized and properly accounted for? People complain.
Given that the Guinness record for the oldest natural conception is 59, I think not (there are a few cases of older women giving birth, but those all involved in vitro fertilization or the like).
What other astoundingly unlikely events do you guys think people should be required to insure against? Meteor impact? Virgin birth? All the molecules of air rushing to one side of the room and suffocating you?
It is pretty much the same as me paying [through taxes] for the FDA beef inspectors even though i don't eat beef. Just a socialization of the cost of basic government services (healthcare is among them, it is just Republicans are slower as usual to recognize the facts of reality, and thus "socialization" of the cost happens inside an insurance pool instead of society-wide as it would be in the case of single-payer )
You're wrong. The law says what the policy has to cover. Whether the policy holder is male or female doesn't enter into it.
"It is pretty much the same as me paying [through taxes] for the FDA beef inspectors"
Really? Since when is the FDA (actually, USDA in this case) a private, for-profit operation?
i already addressed that - the Republicans forced for it to be done through private for-profit operations instead of a government agency like FDA/USDA/etc...
You may not like where the minimum is set, but that doesn't make it anything but a minimum floor.