This is how the system used to work. If you were 25 and had a little minimum wage job that paid you for 32 hours of work, chances are you had no health insurance. You didn’t worry about it much because you’ve never been sick a day in your life.

One day you get hit by a truck while you are commuting and you rack up a $100,000 medical bill that is all yours, since the accident was your fault. Not to worry, though, because when you showed up at the hospital you lived in a state where you could not be denied emergency health care. The hospital forces your unpaid expenses onto the people who do have insurance. Everyone else pays more in health care costs because you were riding on the system for free.

Those days are over. Now you have to pay for your chance of using the health care system just like those of us that have insurance have always done. You can’t rationalize your way out of it because you are young or poor or bullet-proof. Now my health care rates can go down instead of always going up.