> unneeded and unwanted health insurance
Insurance is not something you have because you are ill, it's something you have as a hedge against the probability that you will be ill. Whether you're healthy now has limited bearing on that.
And if you want to be able to have it when you are ill, you need to be willing to contribute to premiums even when you're not. Whether that contribution comes in the form of an explicit premium paid into a risk pool administered by private insurers or in the form of a percentage of your tax dollars paid to a socialized insurance plan (like M4A), that's how insurance works.
From a political standpoint, the individual mandate might have gone down more smoothly if people had been given a choice to opt out of it, in return for agreeing that they could be denied for pre-existing conditions. Democrats at the time made the calculation from a policy/values that too many people wouldn't understand what they were doing and end up shooting themselves in the foot. I used to think that was wrong.
> I ended up paying >10k /year for literally nothing.
> I could have covered my own cancer treatments, out of pocket. I have received nothing for that $100,000+ dollars.
Your numbers don't add up.
Out of pocket costs for a course of cancer treatment usually run well over $100k (and those stats might be for people who do have insurance).
There haven't been many years that the individual mandate was in effect. It went into effect in 2014. Tax for not buying insurance was lowered to zero by 2019. Your yearly premiums would have needed to be not ">$10k" but around $20k for you to have spent $100k in premiums.
And if you didn't want the insurance, it was always legal to simply pay that tax on not having it. How much? Well, for the median income household, that'd be about $700. Much less than You would need to be pulling something north of $500k a year in order for your tax to be $10k. Please, tell us where you worked, and why they were paying you that much while... not offering you insurance?
Or if you were making $500k a year as a business owner / contractor... why you didn't have any accountant or other financial professional giving you better advice? $10k a year in individual premiums is cadillac plan territory, even in expensive metro areas. Generally not what people who are healthy and go to the doctor three times in a decade buy. High-deductible plans with premiums below $300/mo are available to individuals in Los Angeles today. Your individual max required premium shouldn't be more than $3500 a year in 2021 (and in 2014, you could probably get away below $2400/year). Hell, you could cover a family of four in Los Angeles on less than $500/mo in premiums with ACA assistance, for a total cost topping out below $6000/year, so we know that's not what you're talking about (on top of the fact that you spoke in terms of your own health rather than mentioning any family).
Maybe there's some reasonable explanation for why all your numbers are so far outside of credibility here?
> the Democratic Party fought ... M4A
Please. M4A wouldn't even exist as a relevant concept in American political discourse without the Democratic Party. The only reason you know the label at all is because it was advocated in primary contests and by Democrats in congress. Yes, Democrats plural. For an example, read one piece of introduced legislation:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/112...
Notice the list of D Senators as co-sponsors. Notice that it is not short (nearly a third of the caucus at the time). It is profoundly wrong to characterize the Democratic Party as the primary obstacle to something like M4A when it is the only reason why M4A is a potential reality in the US. And saying "I'm no fan of the GOP" doesn't ameliorate that mistake: you can guarantee that the list of Senators sponsoring anything remotely like that bill in the GOP would have a length of 0 (and of course, given when the bill was introduced, only someone who was also ignorant of the composition of the senate at the time could think the primary reason it didn't go anywhere was D efforts).
Also, maybe check your misconceptions about Biden:
https://www.vox.com/21540041/election-2020-joe-biden-health-...
That's him trying to find a way to make medicare for everyone who wants it.