But that is in a limited area of activity, and you have other options than buying insurance. If you don't drive, you don't need insurance. What option can you refrain from exercising to avoid health insurance? Driving is under all sorts of restrictions that would be scandalous civil rights violations in other aspects of life, because it is entirely voluntary and a very narrow category of activity. For example, in violation of the Fifth Amendment right to decline to offer evidence or testimony against yourself, you can be compelled to submit to a breath test for alcohol if arrested under suspicion of DWI. If a twenty year old cop with an associate's degree decides in his opinion that you might be drunk, you can be arrested, have your vehicle impounded entirely on your dime, compelled to give evidence against yourself, and even if said evidence completely exonerates you, you still lost the time you were under arrest, have to pay to get your car back, and have no legal recourse against the officers whose subjective judgment cost you. If you refuse to give samples of your breath or fail to cooperate to the officer's satisfaction, you are automatically convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol, with automatic suspension of your driving privileges for several months.

This is the sort of civil rights forfeiture you are subjected to, merely by the act of sitting in the driver's seat of a motor vehicle, under the EXACT SAME rationale for which you posit a justification for mandatory car insurance. Now do you REALLY want to apply motor vehicle precedents to universal situations? The legal excuse for this sort of appalling violation is that by choosing to drive, you automatically assent to these practices. It is not tyranny, because anyone who wants to avoid being affect merely has to refrain from seeking driving privileges. But how do you apply that predicated exemption to something like medical care?

The obvious solution is to exempt society from bearing those costs.
The argument that society is deprived of people's contributions without taxpayer supported medical care is a hair away from the notion that people and their labor and intellectual property belong to the government (you can substitute the word society, but since the government allocates, rations or disposes of the resources and property which belong to society, or the people, it amounts to the same thing).
But these arguments all stem from initial leftwing interference in the free market. As always, liberalism creates a problem, and then calls for a liberal policy to cure it. Health insurance became tied to employment, because government-mandated wage freezes during the New Deal and World War Two prevented competition among employers (by design). Since they could not offer higher wages to attract workers, they began offering fringe benefits which didn't count against the wage laws, and health insurance became one of the most popular. By the time such restrictions were lifted, the idea of your employer taking care of your health insurance had become fixed. Insurance companies increasingly marketed their policies to employers and in groups, rather than tailored to particular clients, based on the coverage individuals wanted. Employers simply wanted a plan that would cover most of their employees, and that in turn caused the medical industry to evolve to meet the demands of the insurers who became the dominant source of payment (even if a majority of people paid their own medical bills, the insurance industry outweighed any individual or collective of individual consumers). The cost of providing medical care to insured patients is precipitously higher than otherwise, thanks to the required bureaucracy. Opposition to tort reform does not help either, since malpractice insurance is another disproportionate influence, causing decisions to be made on a CYA basis of not getting sued. Liberals are always horrified at corporate influence in politics, but never stop to consider how insurance companies influence regulations to make it impossible to hold them to standards of free market competition or make it difficult for medical professionals to evade the financial influence of the insurance industry. Insurance companies cannot compete across state lines, for instance, giving impossible advantages to giant corporations that can have a headquarters in 50 states, as opposed to a small company that might try to compete by being more responsive to consumers, with lower overhead. If I can buy old or out of print books from a seller three thousand miles away or medicinal clay from Oregon, why can't I buy insurance from a company in a red state that is not legally required by state law to cover breast implants and sex change operations, and so make up its profit margins by charging premiums on a guy like me, who uses maybe two sick days a year, and has not seen a doctor in at least five? All I need for insurance is something minimal for major accidents or trauma, and yet, because of laws that tie my health coverage to my employment, I am actually cheated out of remuneration, because my employer is paying more for my health insurance than I need to spend, wasting money that I am earning with my labor, on something I do not need and was not asked if I wanted. While I do extra work to make up for my coworkers who abuse the sick leave policies and slack or malinger because they are pussies about their illnesses, or are addicted to recreational substances, and come in with hangovers or need smoking breaks.

Strip away all regulation and "fairness" and let everyone buy their own insurance or pay for their own medical care, from whichever providers they want, at whatever terms they can get.

You know, the correlation of Gandalf's moralizing to Frodo applies to liberals on the death penalty and health care. Since you can't give death to all those who deserve it, refrain from trying to give life to those whom you think deserve it.

Don't you see that the very problem with socialized medical care is right in this very statement you make? You are flat out stating that private individuals spend MORE than the state! Private individuals CHOOSE to spend more than the government spends on its constituency! Our public spending is higher, because it has to compete with the standard of care that private spenders choose for themselves. All government entitlements are promoted and defended through the use of comparisons to what private individuals obtain on their own. The government doesn't hand out MREs to hungry people, they give them money so they can eat the same things everyone else does. And on the other side, they don't build and rent out as many residences, as they restrict what providers can charge, which affects the costs and availability of shelter for others. Government largess is affected by, and affects, the options and costs of those who obtain such things on their own, and it happens in the medical field too. They have to spend more, because their dependent constituency wants comparable care to what people obtain privately, and their regulatory efforts to minimize the burden on the less advantaged raise the costs on the market for everyone.

Absent both factors at work, spending will go down, either because the government does not have to compete with the more responsive, flexible and innovative private industry, and won't bother spending as much, or because they are not meddling in the market, and thus it will respond more to consumers, and lower prices. If nothing else, the removal or reduction of administrative and legal costs will represent a significant improvement.

You are conflating and equating things that are not the same or do not relate in the same ways. To assume, especially when the government is involved, that spending equates to results, is absurd. Look at the Obamacare website, for instance. Contractor charges through the nose, and doesn't deliver. Similar expenditures in the military have been infamous for years. Also, there is a bit of a logical flaw in your statement. If we are not getting the results you'd expect from our taxpayer spending on health care, why would we want to increase the degree to which taxpayer money is spent? No one likes or defends the status quo, they just like it better than, and defend it against, a situation where those issues would be exacerbated.

And regarding your other assertion:

This is the typically disingenuous argument in favor of socialized medicine of the sort that gives rise to the expression about "lies, damn lies and statistics." Life expectancy is not a factor of health insurance, government spending on health insurance, or even medical care. If you want to measure life expectancy to assess medical care, do it properly, by comparing the life expectancy of people who receive it. Once you are diagnosed with cancer, for example, your life expectancy right is significantly higher in the USA than in other industrialized countries, especially the socialized medical states of Europe. For US men compared to European men, overall cancer survival rate is 66% to 47%. There are five or six types of cancer in which the USA has a survival rate greater than 90%, and Europeans only hit 90% survival in one of those types. And those rates don't count the people who die with cancers that are undiscovered until their deaths. Europeans are twice as likely to experience that as Americans. The European study that produced those percentages, excluded cancers that first appeared in medical records on a death certificate, and American medicine STILL blew them out of the water.

The infant mortality rate is the same sort of thing. Even setting aside the incredibly low disadvantage in US infant mortality rates compared to other countries, (.2% against Britain & Canada, IIRC), differences in statistical tabulation can affect those numbers. In the USA, if a fetus is at all alive when it is born, it is counted as a live birth, and its subsequent death is a case of infant mortality. Several developed industrial nations, like Germany or France would not count a baby that dies in the first 24 hours, or is under a certain size or born prematurely. Those go on the books as miscarriages, when they are actually the most likely to die. That's like comparing the motor vehicle fatality rates of two groups, but in one group, you exclude people who drive in excess of the speed limit, and who do not wear seatbelts, categorizing them as suicides. Of COURSE the other group is going to have higher motor vehicle mortality rates. It's statistic methodology like this that might explain how other countries were leading the US even before they adopted their current socialized medical systems.

And even without variations of counting methods, there are a lot more factors at play than who is paying for our medical care. Regardless of their economic status, education or age, blacks have higher infant mortality rates, like they are more prone to sickle-cell anemia, or have darker skins. It's just a trait in the population that has no explanation, and factor that does not affect less diverse countries such as Japan or much of Europe.

There are also the behavior and societal issues that contribute to infant mortality and life expectancy, which have nothing to do with how good your doctor is, or how often you get a check up or how lavish your taxpayers fund your entitlement package. America smoked much more than Europeans until very recently, has greater rates of obesity, far worse dietary habits and far more violence. Liberals are usually delighted to point such things out, but only cite them in relation to health care when using the costs of treating such people as a reason to ban large sodas, certain foods and weapons, without bothering to consider that an equally valid solution is to stop making the rest of us pay for the consequences of others' lifestyle choices. Our medical profession might admit to losing more babies that other countries would deny were even born, but a underweight baby in the US has a much better chance of survival than in Japan, which has one of the best infant mortality rates in the world (it has been estimated that US success rates applied to Japan would reduce their infant mortality by 1/3). You also have much better chances of surviving cancer or a gunshot wound under US medical care or of getting medication for heart disease or cholesterol. Americans are far more likely to be receiving those latter treatments than Europeans suggesting either higher incidence of heart disease, which Europeans socialized health care does not have to deal with, rendering life expectancy comparisons suspect as a measure of medical competence, or else it indicates that such treatments are far more available in our system.

And speaking of treatment, the very fact that Europeans classify too-small babies as miscarriages when they die raises a whole area of creepy possibilities, such whether or not efforts being made to save them are comparable to those made by US doctors who will have an infant death on their records, as opposed to a miscarriage.

That is, after all, the essence of opposition to socialized medicine. Issues like rationing and triage are things no one wants to consider applying to their lives or their loved ones, but they are an inevitable outcome of government-funded health care. Or mandatory corporate funding for health care.

It boggles my mind that liberals are the first ones to denounce corporations as inherently evil, and portray them as willing to watch babies die or kill puppies to save a dollar, but at the same time, fanatically support a law that for all intents and purposes, compels people to turn over the funding (and thus control over the decisions) of their health care to corporations. They go around claiming that there is too much corporate influence in politics, and cite the ability of corporations to buy exemptions and loopholes through the use of political donations, but then claim that they will be absolutely able to regulate the corporations to keep them from denying necessary treatment or coverage. If Obamacare is viable, we don't need campaign finance reform, and Obama has no business bitching about the Supreme Court's decisions in his State of the Union Address.