You and Ben both mention Obamacare... but what exactly don't you like about it? I don't get why you think it'll pit neighbor vs. neighbor? Sure, you're fit, your neighbor's fat, but if you both pay health insurance and he visits the doctor 7x more than you do, his premiums and co-pays will reflect that. As I pointed out, in the end, we all pay for it anyway -- so the cheaper you can make it the better. You think it's about hand holding, sure, some of it is because we can't just murder gaggles of people that make dumb decisions, or are old, or whatever, so in lieu of that, we need to take those idiots who are still Americans (for the most part, we don't need to get into the illegal debate because it's really a very small percentage) and figure out how to make those idiots cheaper on the rest of us. It was a HUGE compromise on Obamacare, when the single-payer system was scrapped for this private sector deal. It's been shown that social healthcare is cheaper. Medicare/Medicaid costs grew at around 400%, while the private sector grew around 700% -- both unacceptable, but it still demonstrates the "socialized" care that is Medicare/medicaid is cheaper than the private solutions. Medicare Saves Money http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/opinion/13krugman.html