> As it should be, why should we defer to corporations only following a profit motive the freedoms you have? You open a can of worms by allowing companies to control people's behaviour through how much they can pay for it. There's a limit where pricing is not about efficient markets but social control by corporations and you are leaning into it without a second thought, to me this sounds scary as fuck.

> You need to balance freedoms with its costs, I'd much rather have the government using taxes to incentivise/disincentivise consumer behaviour rather than corporations controlling what freedoms you are allowed by pricing you out of them.

I don't quite understand this argument: nobody is obligated (federally) to purchase insurance, or otherwise participate in a particular health care plan. This isn't about "efficient markets"; this is about incentivizing healthy behavior for socially mandatory programs.

As far as "government intervention for consumer behavior": you wind up with the same problem with sugar taxes begin "inequitable" and opposed by many rights groups or academic publications. See https://nutr.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/UW-Tax-Equity.... In many cases, people simply don't want it because they feel government impacting behavior by mandatory taxes is worse than opt-in programs, but this may simply be American values.

> And one day you expect to be old, imagine if you don't make it, or lose it all, and now requires care without being able to pay for it. Is that humane? I prefer as a young person to pay my taxes knowing that the ones in need have access to universal healthcare where I live rather than the thought that my society allows disadvantaged people to die because they didn't make enough money so their life is worthless.

I'm going to be real: reading through your profile you hardly fit the definition of "young person" (you literally recall living through events before I was born) so I'll lay it out in plain terms: young people have zero guarantees, both in the US and EU nations. The elderly have benefitted from policies which have poorly invested the monies for social security in treasuries earning 3%. They have fought against building housing, resulting in inflated values. They vote themselves generous benefits, mortgaging the future to allow them to "age in place" -- which usually fails anyway -- rather than relocating to elder care communities for more efficient service delivery. So realistically, realize the youths' last benefit in society is their youth, and saying "sacrifice more" rings hollow.

> A society exists to make all of our lives better, it doesn't make sense to live in a society while being a hyper-individualistic freak; nothing you've achieved in life would be possible without the help of others, to educate you, to transport you, to grow the food you eat, to deliver that food, so on and so forth. Paying back to all of these other people, even if they don't make as much money and/or cost more to the system, averaging out through society is the fairest way to ensure everyone in it can have dignity.

This is just a thin veneer over reality: at any given point in time there are finite resources. If there aren't enough resources to address the issue in its totality (as it is with healthcare, where we spend massive money on obesity and alcoholism) nothing we do will make "enough", even at 17% of GDP. In the us, this manifests as price rationing; those can can pay, receive. In the EU, this manifests as physician bedside rationing (see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1831659/). Nothing you have stated ameliorates the rationing: it simply ignores the fact that it is already happening, even in socialized health systems.

And -- as far as a "hyper-individualistic freak" -- I grew up in a "disadvantaged" school district (I just checked) to immigrant parents. I didn't qualify for disadvantaged grants to attend better ranked colleges because I wasn't a URM, so I just went to a state school and worked in research labs during the year and local engineering firms to pay my tuition. That's my life. In the US, you can absolutely claw your way up. Technical skills and entrepreneurship are absolutely the engine of social mobility Europe wishes it has, and why we can actually provide immigrants integration and social mobility. I 100% prefer this over the sirens song of socialized care which simply doesn't exist, even in Europe.