Some States Still Penalize Residents For Not Having Health Insurance

When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed in 2009, it contained a provision penalizing individuals unwilling or unable to purchase healthcare insurance. Despite the unpopularity of this measure, which led Congress to reverse it a decade later, four states and Washington, D.C. still maintain a similar punishment.

If a state enforces such legislation, residents need to understand the precise law to avoid the financial costs of running afoul of it. But they also need to take all action possible to overturn it. Few laws embody the current trend of nanny state overreach better than these do, and they are worthy of particularly vigorous opposition.

Living In A Penalty Zone

Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. levy fines for lack of insurance unless exemption criteria (listed in provided links) exist and residents obtain waivers. (Vermont, though maintaining a technical mandate, does not currently charge for lack of compliance.) 

In these states, allowable exemptions include low income and some religious objections. However, it is up to the individuals—who tend to be the very ones with less access to information and assistance, due to financial constraints—to understand and manage the legal process.

Immoral, Counterproductive, And Predatory

For numerous reasons, it is no overstatement to assert this legislation is some of the worst in the country’s history. Despite attempted comparisons to existing laws, these are the first to truly force everyone to purchase a product. People who never visit a doctor are compelled to buy discount cards for a service they don’t want. An independent adult has finally lost the last vestige of ability to live without paying the government for the privilege of existing.

Furthermore, 80% of those receiving penalties for lack of coverage under the old federal law were individuals making less than $50,00 per year. So make no mistake, these remaining mandates are a hardship on the most vulnerable. No action could be less productive than fining someone whose “crime” was having no money. No laws perpetuate the cycle of poverty more effectively than this. 

Dangerous Rationale 

Other absurd aspects of these laws are the reasons behind them. For example, supporters fret removing the penalties will decrease government tax revenues. In other words, despite their continual claims they exist to serve impoverished people, they are penalizing impoverished people to get more money. 

Another weak justification claims someone who does not pay into the healthcare system through insurance might still take money out of it, due to laws mandating care for indigent patients. However, these same legislators made the laws mandating indigent care. This is yet another case of the government forcing laws with the excuse they are necessary … to allow compliance with laws already forced by the government. 

Finally, the assertion that healthy persons are needed to subsidize unhealthy ones has merit, but does not justify mandated insurance. Individuals who are better positioned in any aspect of life are always needed and morally obligated to help the less fortunate. But a traditional insurance structure is not necessarily the best way to accomplish this in health care, any more than it is in housing, food, or other necessities. 

Tax-funded health insurance for all eliminates the incentive for individuals to care for themselves that is present in other insurance models. Drivers would spend less effort avoiding traffic violations if their auto insurance rates could never increase, and repairs were free. Government-run insurance is doomed to operate with particular inefficiency. Forced “charity” not only removes freedom of donors, it is notoriously fraught with administrative bloat and other waste, corruption, fraud, and failed oversight. 

The Most Insidious Danger

The most destructive effects of these policies may be the infantilization, weakening, and subjugation of the population. Once again, taxpayers are legally forced to take responsibility for other people’s decisions but prohibited from taking responsibility for their own. Once again, legislators are stripping individuals, families, communities, and charitable organizations of their ability to address their own problems. 

In return, legislators have a population increasingly dependent on them—therefore more likely to vote for them—in a desperate effort just to survive. Residents in affected states need to see through the faux helpfulness of these laws and demand the basic level of autonomy and respect being denied them.