because she didn't have enough money to make her car insurance payment last month. So they imposed a penalty for not having car insurance, and threatened to cancel her car registration.

The logic escapes me. If she didn't have enough money to pay her monthly car insurance payment, where was she going to get the money to pay a $423 fine on top of that? Luckily for her, we were able to bail her out, this time. But how many people don't have any fallback option? Most of us don't.

The system punishes punishing a person for being poor by making them poorer, while at the same time making them less able to earn the money to pay the fine and the car insurance, by taking away the means of transportation to their job.

THIS is the kind of thing we will be facing with mandatory health insurance.

I'm old enough to remember when car insurance was optional, not mandatory. When the car insurance companies decided they wanted to force everyone to have coverage, they started refusing to write policies for all kinds of arbitrary reasons, while significantly raising prices. I remember when insurance companies told New Jersey they would no longer write policies for NJ residents, unless the state legislature passed a law requiring everyone to have car insurance. And making the same threats every time they wanted to raise their rates beyond what the state allowed, like a kid throwing a tantrum.

I'm not saying that having car insurance is a bad thing. If you get hit by someone without insurance, and you don't live in a state with a no-fault law, and you can't afford to hire a law to sue the person, or the person is poor and/or an illegal immigrant, you are screwed on medical bills and car repairs.

But now we will be at the utterly merciless mercy of the health insurance companies. And I don't trust them one iota.