For many, many years I’ve said that people are NOT talking about medical or health “insurance,” but rather a bumper-to-bumper full maintenance plan. My longtime friend, Kyle Bennett, illustrates how it would go if people were as stupid and ignorant about automobile maintenance and insurance as they are about so-called health insurance.

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If you handled your car expenses the way most people handle health “insurance”….

You’d get a plan paid for by your employer that covers gas, oil changes, new tires, maintenance and even washing and detailing. Accidents too, by the way. You would have to go to the car dealer for anything, including filling the gas tank, and there would only be a handful of them in town. Maybe only one or none in some small towns. You’d have to make an appointment for gas or a tune-up, and even so you’d spend most of the day in the waiting room.

If you don’t have coverage and had to pay for these things yourself, you’d pay a lot. Gas would be $75 a gallon, an oil change would cost $500 (Jiffy Lube would be banned). If you needed a tune-up, it would have to be an in-patient procedure requiring you to leave your car for several days. Maybe two weeks. You’d not only have to pay for the service itself, parts, and the mechanic who does it, totalling $8500, but you’d have to pay for a specialist in turning the engine on and off, a surcharge for the tools and diagnostic computer, and, of course, a fee for keeping the car all those days ($900/day).

But, so long as you had a job, all those things would be covered for only a $300 deduction per paycheck. It wouldn’t matter if your car was brand new and never breaks down, or an old clunker that barely gets you to work. Of course, if you switched jobs, you would lose your coverage, and buying a new policy would be very expensive since your car might have pre-existing conditions. Or, you could carry over the premium for only an additional $600/month.

You’d also have to spend half your life hearing arguments from the people who created that system that it is completely unfair and too expensive, so we should go to a single-payer system and have the government cover everything. After that happens, they’d eventually decide, for efficiency purposes, that everybody should drive the same car, produced by the government (think Yugo). If you’re lucky, there will only be a three-year waiting list for them.

Of course, the people advocating that you just pay for these things yourself, except for major accidents, would be crazy. Nobody could afford to do that.

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The whole thing is a direct cause of generations of financial and economic illiteracy and the general dumbing down of America, such that it’s ripe for political and big-corp exploitation at every turn.

…And so it’s well deserved, because everyone should always get exactly what they deserve.