Tyler Cowen, quoting Ezra Klein on “penalties” for failing to purchase private insurance:
If you don’t have employer-based coverage, Medicare, Medicaid, or anything else, and premiums won’t cost more than 8 percent of your monthly income, and you refuse to purchase insurance, at that point, you will be assessed a penalty of up to 2 percent of your annual income. In return for that, you get guaranteed treatment at hospitals and an insurance system that allows you to purchase full coverage the moment you decide you actually need it. In the current system, if you don’t buy insurance, and then find you need it, you’ll likely never be able to buy insurance again. There’s a very good case to be made, in fact, that paying the 2 percent penalty is the best deal in the bill.
Cheap Talk 
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December 22, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Patricia Shannon
Uninsured ER patients twice as likely to die
[Anybody’s who’s surprised by this has been living in la-la-land.]
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33971846/ns/health-health_care/
CHICAGO – Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.
December 22, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Agent Continuum
Insurance is better as the pool gets larger so why not insure everyone and pay for it out of a broad tax base? — It’s not obvious that the current or new systems do anything meaningful about moral hazard so let’s get rid of adverse selection, at least.
December 22, 2009 at 10:47 pm
a
To Patricia: and of course, there is no selection bias at all — none whatsoever. All those insured people with gunshot wounds…