Currently, insurance companies provide insurance to all of the employees of a company at lower cost under the assumption (occasionally requirement) that most of the employees will accept the insurance, and the costs of the few sickly will be overcome by the lack of costs of the healthy. There is, to my knowledge, no requirement that insurance companies provide these deals to employers, so they must be making money at it.

What this bill does is create a new group from the set of people who don't have employer-based coverage. Many of these people don't have coverage merely because they cannot afford individual rates. There are certainly some who feel that they are healthy enough to chance not having it. However, I find it hard to believe that there is a significant difference in the ratio of sick people to healthy people between the employer-covered group and the rest.

Assuming that there is no difference, why would a plan that makes them money when it's done with the employees of a company not make them money when done with the general populace? Imagine instead of the government intervening with this bill, that those 36 million people all suddenly got jobs that provided health insurance. Would the health insurance providers be complaining that they were going to start losing money what with all of the new customers? Of course not; they'd be making more money than ever.

I understand your problem with being forced to purchase insurance, but there are honestly very few people who are opposed to buying insurance, yourself probably included. I understand that your concern is the force. But in order to maintain the ratio, you have to make sure that there isn't a statistical bias in the numbers by preventing the self-selection bias that might exist from the healthy removing themselves from the pool. It's there both to make sure that as much of our society as possible is covered, and to make sure that the insurance companies can still function while keeping premiums relatively low. It's the same reason that the bill prohibits (new) individual policies.

Will it force some people who don't want to buy insurance to do so? Yes. Sorry. We also force you to pay for highways that you may or may not directly use. C'est la vie. Will it cause insurance profits to go down, or rates to go up? Maybe, as insurance companies will no longer be able to drop people who start to incur large expenses. Then again, they're unlikely to be spending money on finding "legal" reasons to drop those people, so there probably won't be as big an effect as seems likely on the surface. Does it make insurance companies provide a minimum level of coverage? Yeah, but we also make companies that sell beef actually provide beef to the consumer, not cellulose with real-beef-flavor, and we require auto companies to put brakes in their cars. I don't think any of that is unreasonable, and it's these provisions that the insurance companies are actually opposed to.

I also understand your point about insurance companies being profit driven. It makes financial sense for them to reduce their costs. Which, honestly, is why a profit-driven system makes bad sense for healthcare. Imagine a scenario where an insurance company gets a claim for a medicine that costs $100,000. If the patient doesn't get it, they will die in three days. It's in the insurance company's interests to just stall for three days and let the person die. Would you be okay with that? I'm sure (at least one of) your rejoinder(s) would be that that person would still get that drug somehow. Which is probably true. But should the insurance company be able to foist that cost off onto someone else? And how is that different from dropping them because they went searching and found that ingrown toenail they forgot to report?