A car isn't necessary to live a decent life. It's a choice you make with discretionary income. Medical care is often required to maintain your life, prevent serious illness, and maintain quality of life. Those who don't drive are still paying taxes to pay for the roads you drive on; they can't opt out on those costs either.
Canada hasn't had a healthcare crisis and we have had a national plan covering everyone since the 1970s. So better medicine isn't needed to provide this. Some Americans like to pretend we have a lower quality system, but in reality Canadians live around 2 years longer then Americans, and on average Canadians are healthier then Americans ( see obesity rates ).
Where did I claim that owning a car is necessary to live? Where did I claim that those who don't drive don't pay taxes? Why can't you address my argument rather that attacking arguments that I never made??
My point is that if healthcare only covered the catastrophic stuff, it would not need to be so expensive. Based on your argument, "medical care is often required to maintain your life / quality of life" well shit, that definition includes everything. There are so many things necessary to maintain my quality of life or even just life. Ignoring the necessities for quality of life which for some might include beer, drugs, hookers, and video games, let's just consider the top 2 (and there are many more) basic necessities aside from safety. I need food and shelter. Then by your definition, healthcare / insurance should also provide those as they are basic necessities for life. But an insurance plan that covers food is analogous to my car insurance example that covers gasoline. It's just absurd. Health insurance should only cover unexpected catastrophic events. If it did, then it would be affordable. And also things such as regular doctor visits not covered by the healthcare would become a lot cheaper because the laws of supply and demand would kick in -- people would start shopping around for doctors and young people would often skip going to the doctor effectively lowering the demand for those services and consequently cause prices to drop. Peter Schiff articulates this same point well:
I also don't dispute that Canadians are healthier than Americans. But I don't think that's due to having more access to doctors or drugs. It's cultural and perhaps influenced by the demographics (race). For example, since Canada is mostly white and Asian, how does the longevity of those races compare to the average longevity of the same races in the US?
I'm not against helping others out, but I realize that resources are finite and I'd rather spend money on cancer research to help the guy who did everything right in terms of diet and exercise, but ended up getting colon cancer and only has a few months to live vs. someone who made poor life choices, smoked, did drugs, ate crap food, etc. and needs special services to accommodate disability due to type-2 diabetes.