Jeff Jacoby makes a few excellent points in his recent Boston Globe article on Mitt Romney, mandatory insurance, and health care policy:

• “To begin with, just because a 25-year-old law [EMTALA] requires hospitals to provide emergency care to all comers, why does it follow that another law must force every citizen to buy insurance?”
• “[I]f the individual mandate’s purpose is to prevent free riders from shifting the cost of their emergency care to others, all it should require is enough insurance to cover a trip to the emergency room. Instead, both RomneyCare and ObamaCare require everyone to be covered for numerous benefits going far beyond emergency care.”Of course, mandatory insurance is not about “individual responsibility, but forcing you to buy more insurance than you need, which is in effect a tax to pay for other people’s health care. That’s socialized medicine.Jacoby continues:
• “Supporters of the individual mandate often imply that going without insurance and being a free rider are one and the same. They aren’t.”  Four conditions must be met for an uninsured person to be a free-rider.
• “[F]ive years of the RomneyCare mandate have done nothing to reduce the crowding in Massachusetts emergency rooms.”
• “It is true that fewer Massachusetts residents are uninsured. But most of the newly insured aren’t paying their way: They’re being subsidized by taxpayers.”

Read more: Romney’s steadfast stand for a bad idea.

(via FIRM)