Quote from piezoe:
You'll have less problem with this if you think of it in reverse. Think of the tax being there to begin with, and government giving you a credit against your taxes for buying health insurance. this is exactly like all the other tax incentives that the government has used over the years to "encourage" you to do something they want you to do. Not saying it's good or bad, just saying it's really no different.
Your last paragraph may not be quite right. It seems the plan is to subsidize those who can't actually afford to buy insurance. So these folks won't be "giving" money to the private health insurance companies. Instead it will be you, via your tax dollars, doing the giving on behalf of the unemployed and low income workers.
None of this solves the problem that got us to this point, and that is that health care in the U.S. costs twice what it does in the next most expensive country, and up to eight times what it does in some other industrialized countries, and with worse outcomes. Health care delivery in the U.S. is a disaster! In the U.S., medical care is delivered by a government protected cartel --thoroughly capitalist by the way, but a very unsatisfactory form of capitalism, the worst kind, the kind without competition.
Just as the parent who habitually bails out an errant child becomes an enabler who has good intentions but in the end only makes matters worse, most of our efforts to find a way to pay for too expensive medical care have, in the end, just enabled the health care industry to charge even more and engage in still more egregious excesses and inefficiencies. Obama care, while it does incorporate a few features aimed at reducing inefficiencies and introducing more competition in medicine, was stripped of its most effective cost control feature, the public option. As such it won't do much to bring overall costs down. It is not going to solve the health care cost problem in the U.S.
Simply an uneducated comment. Worst outcomes for who, precisely? America has the best hospitals in the world, for anyone for can afford it. It is in America that groundbreaking treatments and medicine can be found. Even in universal healthcare Europe, many Europeans come to the United States for treatment that is not available under their healthcare systems. I personally know a few brits who went to Hopkins and Sloan Kettering for treatment because the NHS would not and could not afford the specialized drugs & procedures needed for their condition. You don't see Americans going to Europe to be treated, do you?