Your analogy is flimsy and borderline stupid. Insurance is a fundamentally different thing than food and housing, because of the nature of resource-pooling. That's why there isn't a single country on earth with a working healthcare system that relies solely on people selecting and paying for health insurance on a strictly individual basis.

Moreover, without health insurance, many people die slow, agonizing, and utterly avoidable deaths. (In the US, the emergency room will fix your broken femur without insurance, but nobody will treat your long-term cancer or multiple sclerosis without insurance.) For many people, perhaps most, this adds an additional moral dimension to the issue.

I hate hearing people make this flimsy-ass argument about health care. "Should the government pay for your clothes too? How about your lawn service?" Health care is a FUNDAMENTALLY different kind of issue.

I too have misgivings about the federal government being competent to administer such a program effectively, but pretending this problem can be solved without some form of (fairly massive) collective policy doesn't contribute any value to the discussion.

The parent post was modded down (it was zero when I read it) due to a disgraceful lack of mathematical ability in the hacker community. I see no other explanation. Insurance has to do with the law of large numbers. Without it, the most elementary business transactions become inconceivable. For competent programmers not to understand the trivial mathematics of risk pools is a cringe-inducing embarrassment. Of course insurance is not like housing. Suggesting that the government act like the insurer of last resort--which is one of its functions--and manage risk to enable markets to function is anything like asking the government to provide universal free housing is ignorant. Some kind of minimal assistance in the form of food, clothing and shelter to the most deprived persons (or the unemployed) is a kind of insurance against misfortunes that could affect anyone, but again this has to do with the law of large numbers. Beyond that minimal level of insurance the government might provide, universal free housing and food has absolutely nothing to do with insurance.

What is preposterous is the implicit idea that because insurance encourages risk-taking, the benefits of insurance must be ignored. That's the conservative fallacy of personal responsibility: that the possibility of the slightest cost (in the form of the riskier behavior enabled by insurance) outweighs any conceivable benefit, and that no cost-benefit analysis is possible. The cost of not understanding risk pools includes reduced economic growth, fewer startups and inflated insurance premiums. The lack of mathematical sophistication among hackers on this point should be humiliating.