…between television and health care. Technically, free television is paid for by advertisers. If I remember correctly (I wasn’t around at the time cable started), one of the appeals of cable television originally was that payment for the product meant that one could escape the advertisements. That is clearly no longer the case, though. So, those who do not have cable are not in any real sense “free riders,” merely those targeted by very well-planned marketing efforts, like the person who goes to the free lunch and endures several hours of sales pitches about Real-Estate Investment Trusts. The lunch isn’t free–it requires moral willpower to endure. Neither is watching tv truly free in that sense.

At its heart the issue is one of coercion. I haven’t had health insurance for a long while (a couple of years) not because I am a foolishly risky person but because when I lost my job as an engineering intern in the construction bust of Florida in 2009, the only jobs I could find were as independent contractors without steady pay or benefits. And I would hardly consider having to pay the doctor over $100 for a checkup on a gout attack being a free rider either. Our health insurance system, even before Obamacare, was really messed up, but it’s hard not to see that a better solution would have been to try to find some way of voluntarily aggregating people together so that the law of large numbers could work in their favor, especially if they were people who were young and without a great deal of risky behavior (as is the case with myself personally). It’s a shame that better roads haven’t been taken.