It seems to make much more sense to me from an intuitive standpoint that the sick must pay for their own healthcare.

Everyone needs healthcare. If they don't need it now, they'll need it later. Everyone gets ill. Everyone has accidents. Everybody needs an ambulance once in a while.

The last thing we want is people refusing treatment they need because they can't afford it. That's effectively systematically killing and maiming and poisoning poor people. Think of the children whose parents can't afford to pay to get their stomach pumped after they drank the contents of the cupboard-under-the-sink!

The amount of value you get from money is roughly proportional to the logarithm of how much money you have. If you're living hand-to-mouth with $50 in your bank account, then you'll appreciate $100 immensely. If, on the other hand, you're well-off and have $500 000 in your account, you'll probably not even notice the loss of $100.

If a rich person needs to pay $2 000 to fix their broken leg, they'll happily pay that; it's a one-off, and it's not that much money. They'd probably be happy to pay twice that! A poor person, on the other hand, would not even be able to afford the $600 trip in the ambulance. They'd just keep their leg as still as possible, and go into work the next day because otherwise they starve. (Numbers here are actually lower than most people would be paying.)

One solution to this problem is insurance, which is basically a fancy way of saying "pay us double the price of your medical expenses, but more spread out and somewhat shared between different people". This would be a fairly good solution to the "I don't want to get medical care because I can't afford it" except for two things:

• If money's tight, you'll want to cut down on your expenses, and many people view medical insurance as an expense to be cut down on.
• Even if you have insurance, if you make a claim on it there's something called a "premium" – basically, you have to pay even more more money if you take money out of the insurance pot. This means there's still an incentive not to get treatment.

(Also, ObamaCare did a thing; I'm not really sure of the details. Everyone seems to say something different about it, but never what it actually is.)

So, insurance isn't a good solution; it merely masks the problem. If only there was a better way? Some solution that meant that richer people (who'd miss the money less) paid more, and poorer people (who need the money more) paid less, and meant that everybody had to pay into the system so they would always, always, always be covered.

… Isn't that describing taxes? You have to pay them, and people pay an amount proportional to their income / expenditure (unless they're avoiding or evading them, but that's another story). Taxes would also mean that you wouldn't have to check insurance details or anything; everyone is covered, no matter what.

There are, of course, numerous problems with the tax system. That varies from country to country (and, from what I know about the US, from state to state). However, it's better than the insurance system you've got now.

Additional benefits of taxes for medical care (so-called Universal Healthcare, also known as EVIL SOCIALISM):

• It removes the overhead of insurance companies, resulting in the total amount being paid by US citizens falling.
• If state hospitals are established for this (instead of paying private hospitals from the money from taxes), there's a drastically reduced incentive for hospitals to have artificially high profit margins (if it's set up so the excess money doesn't go into the decision makers' pockets).
• If it's coming out of a pot that's under the government's control, there's incentive for the government to push for lower profit margins for drugs companies – and even for the government to begin directly financing the development of vital but unpatentable medicines.

Your current system isn't working very well. Look at other countries; they must be doing something right! (scroll down to the last graph of the page or click on expando)

What are you going to do about it?