...which results in more people declining to, or unable to, carry any coverage at all, relying on things like emergency services when they have to, and otherwise deferring all healthcare until they’re in a crisis. HCPs providing care to these folks must then also defray their expenses by increasing costs to people who do carry coverage, meaning that the insured are not only subsidizing the uninsured, but are doing so at astronomically higher rates than would be necessary if those people had access to affordable, regular healthcare in the first place.
That’s what I was trying to get at with my original response to Chuck. Non-smokers have a vested interest in reducing smoking rates because we don’t want them in our risk pools, but we also don’t want them to be completely uninsured either.