I think taxing people for not doing anything at all is a very dangerous precedent. I understand fully - and much more than you believe - why an individual mandate was written into the law: it was deemed necessary to make the ban on rejecting people for pre-existing conditions work.

Frankly, I'm unconvinced the pre-Obamacare situation wasn't an improvement over Obamacare, thus, repeal and replace-with-nothing could be considered progress. If people want to be uninsured, I'm OK with that, because as you should know about me by now, individual choice matters to me a great deal. I don't believe the government knows better than the individual about what's best for the individual. That's a fundamental guiding principle.

Besides, Obamacare trumpets huge gains in the number of insured, but if you have colossal deductibles, do you really have health insurance? Ultimately, I don't know what the best health care solution is, but I think it's better found by starting with attacking the cost of it in the first place. The more government takes over the health care market, the less incentive there is to reduce those costs because it can just borrow the difference and, in an election year, Democrats can get elected with the usual tax-the-rich campaign. And the more government takes over the health care market, the more incentive there is to promise goodies in those election years and continue the costs spiraling upwards. The usual pitch is that single-payer care would have a ton of leverage in negotiating costs downwards, but I don't believe that would actually happen because 1) if people believed that, they wouldn't oppose big mergers of health insurance companies and 2) the government has the same leverage in the defense industry and there's absolutely no reason to believe they use it.