From a reader:

Jonah,
I’ll make this quick, as you obviously are flooded thanks to this.
The Mass. plan is bad, and the conservative analogy to car insurance is bad, because it treats a symptom rather than a cause.
Government regulation of healthcare ratchets up the cost of basic coverage for individuals due to mandated coverage and a vicious cost spiral. Mandated coverage increases cost of insurance, decreasing demand (especially amongst the young and healthy), increasing the sickness of the risk pool and thence the cost to cover, further decreasing demand…. Coverage mandates make some political sense when you’ve already linked employment to insurance (thanks to wage controls and tax preferences for employer paid benefits), especially in an era of mass industrial employment where individuals had little control over what coverage they had.
Taking this into consideration, the Mass. plan levers up a 3rd (fourth counting the stupid federal Medicaid mandate that Mass is responding to) generation of government action that is designed to treat a symptom of an earlier mistake. Thankfully the 1st mistake has been fixed, but attacking the tax preference for employer paid healthcare and state mandated minimum coverage is a much better, faster, and cheaper way than mandating the purchase of coverage.
This is a job killing tax that penalises the poor and will chase young people and entrepreneurs out of Massachusetts. The only benefit is that there will be fewer possible victims of Ted Kennedy’s bad driving after dates!
Glad to hear that Ramesh has convinced you, and I hope that this reinforces that decision,