By Zach Watson

Over the last month I’ve been getting emails from Healthcare.gov nearly everyday, reminding me that the deadline for healthcare was arriving on December 15th and that I needed to sign up in order to avoid the fine for 2016. They’ve extended this deadline to today, December 17th, and still I’m letting the hours slip away.

I have a particular case. I am a healthy thirty-one-year-old single man without children and I work for a small bar that has less than ten employees. So it is up to me to find my own health insurance.

Okay, all well and good.

I went to my email, clicked on the icon, went to my account and found my way to the state of Washington Marketplace. I typed in my zip code, my age and my annual income and hit okay. This took me to the next page, a list of private insurance companies and the plans they offer conveniently arranged in price from lowest to highest.

I put that I made $30,000 a year, a fair estimate. The cheapest plan came up with no government aid at $178 a month, $2136 bucks a year, or about 7% of my annual salary.

It’s great that more and more people are signing up for health insurance, that premiums are cheaper than ever, and that people with pre-existing conditions are getting insured. And it’s very reasonable to pay 7% of my salary on healthcare. But what bothers me, and the reason I’m not signing up, is what the $178 buys me.

Basically, insurance for catastrophe.

I would have a $5000 deductible. If I went to the ER, if I had to get an Xray done, or if I had to get some special drug, I would pay. I could go see a primary care physician for $25 or a specialist for $50, but if I need tests, which they’ve requested every time I’ve ever been to a specialist, I would pay for those. Then there is this annual out of pocket maximum, which would be, for the Molina Healthcare Bronze plan, $6850 a year.

Let’s say I broke my leg and had to have surgery. I would be covered after I paid my premium, $2136 a year, and my maximum out of pocket at $6850. I don’t feel safe with that. I’d either be broke or in debt.

Then there is the real kicker: if I don’t like this system and don’t want to pay for it, the government is going to fine me.

Perhaps the fear of having to pay something for nothing is enough to get us groundlings moving, which seems to be working to some extent, but I hardly think it is just. I felt at first like this bill was amended and made to suit a healthcare oligarchy. The government made a convenient marketplace for the insurance providers and is now threatening to fine me significantly if I don’t subscribe. And when I look at it that way, it doesn’t seem so socially-benefiting, seems more like I’m being forced into capitalism, profiteering predicated on providing a modern-day human right.

But nothing is simply black and white, and according to the WHO, 17 percent of this country’s GDP is healthcare. I understand keeping it private, keeping the prices up, and augmenting an already existing system — they need to pay a lot of people. We are in a transition, and as I mentioned earlier, the ACA is doing some things good, and it still has potential for more. But it’s imperfect and unfair.

Perhaps if the coverage were good, they wouldn’t have to fine us. I don’t want to be forced into buying nothing.

So next year, because it’s still cheaper for me to conscientiously object, I’m choosing the 2.5 percent fine. I figure if some malady were to befall upon me in the upcoming year, I’ll still be sick, broke and in debt with or without the insurance.