FEATURED QUESTION: Healthcare Reform

(This post stuck here for a few days. Please scroll down for other material)

Recently Ann Coulter wrote "Three Cheers for Romneycare!" She stated:

...Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance was considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats' piecemeal socialization of the entire medical industry....

Read the entire essay HERE.

How does any kind of insurance work?

According to this source:

Transfer of Risk

Insurance cannot remove the risk or the likelihood that one might become a victim of any of these events, but what it does is transfer all or some of the financial impact of any of these events. Insurance exists to help individuals recover from the financial consequences of these events by pooling the resources of a large group to pay for the losses of a small group.

[...]

Law of Large Numbers

In order to afford to cover the financial losses of its customers, an insurance company needs a very large base of members. For each different type of loss that they insure against, insurance companies have years of statistics that help them calculate how many losses they are likely to have. They are counting on the law of large numbers which, when applied to insurance, states that the more members in an insured group, the more likely it is that the number of actual losses will be very close to the number of expected losses....

Read the rest HERE.

Many bristle at the health insurance individual mandate, primarily because, under the individual mandate, the government is requiring the individual to buy a particular product. Furthermore, according to THIS, the individual mandate has several significant hazards.

A matter that I've been puzzling about for some time:

Considering the rising costs of health care, the rising costs of health insurance premiums, and the coming tsunami of aging Baby Boomers (resulting in reduced opportunity for transfer of risk as well as a reduced tax base for funding private health insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid), what is the viable alternative to the individual mandate for health insurance?

WARNING! The comments thread to this post contains a heated discussion.