{"id":430,"date":"2024-12-06T19:59:30","date_gmt":"2024-12-07T03:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/?p=430"},"modified":"2024-12-06T19:59:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-07T03:59:30","slug":"we-can-eliminate-health-insurance-if-we-want-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/?p=430","title":{"rendered":"We can eliminate health insurance if we want to"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, remember when structures on fire had to be insured by specific fire companies to actually be protected against just being allowed to burn uncontrollably?<br \/>\nWe realized the enormous cost of that to society and eliminated that form of fire insurance entirely, and established municipal fire departments.<sup id=\"fnref-430-1\"><a href=\"#fn-430-1\" class=\"jetpack-footnote\" title=\"Read footnote.\">1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m sure at the time there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the Free Market\u2122 and how many people would lose their jobs and rending of garments about how unfair it was for investors in those corporations to lose their investments. But we got through that bullshit, and our society is better off.<\/p>\n<p>Why does health insurance exist? Why does for-profit healthcare exist? Why don\u2019t we just abolish it and establish a health service instead, like we did to fire insurance companies? What do you say, California?<\/p>\n<div class=\"footnotes\">\n<hr \/>\n<ol>\n<li id=\"fn-430-1\">\nMostly. There are still extremely rural places where this can happen, but it\u2019s mostly because people insist on not living in a municipal or doing their part to support the services they use.&#160;<a href=\"#fnref-430-1\" title=\"Return to main content.\">&#8617;<\/a>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, remember when structures on fire had to be insured by specific fire companies to actually be protected against just being allowed to burn uncontrollably? We realized the enormous cost of that to society and eliminated that form of fire insurance entirely, and established municipal fire departments.1 I\u2019m sure at the time there was much&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[151],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-politics","tag-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p74loH-6W","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":431,"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions\/431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eschatologist.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}