I like how my post about healthcare got but 1 reply and the one about celebrities got several more. Not every person who identifies as liberal wants universal healthcare. In fact, I want a system that was put in place by a guy running for president as a republican. On matters of economics I do tend to be a bit of an elitist though.

The biggest single factor in wasting money of the people who pay a lot of taxes on poor people who don't have health insurance is hospital emergency room care that goes unpaid. People without insurance know that an emergency room wil not turn them away so that's where they go. Spend a little bit of money on the front end to decrease the number of uninsured, they stop going in to emergency rooms they know full well they can't pay for, and the costs on the back end to taxpayers goes down dramatically.

In MA you can still get premium healthcare however there are assorted measures in place that work to significantly reduce the number of uninsured. The state provides a health plan to people who have no other option, and otherwise requires employers to make contributions towards getting their employees insured.

So, while those folks with a moral aversion to any sort of "income redistribution" might still not like this approach, I like it because it manages to balance the suposedly competing (if one ignores the aforementioned emergency room cost issue) goals of reducing taxpayer spending on uninsured, and also decreasing the overall number of uninsured.

You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massach...lth_reform_law