I experience cognitive disconnect when I hear politicians talk about reducing healthcare expense by providing insurance for the 47 million people in the United States who have no health insurance. (Many of the uninsured are reported to be illegal aliens.) My understanding is that insurance is an instrument for spreading risk, not for reducing expense.) The rationale for providing insurance for those not now insured appears to be to provide healthcare for people who currently do not get it. (That may not be entirely the situation: hospitals in the Dallas-Fort Worth area spent almost $700 million on healthcare for the uninsured, again mostly illegal aliens, in 2006.) The politician's real objective appears to be to create a socialized medicine system in the United States. They are clever enough to know this has to be done by stealth because the country is rather conservative. The politicians claim that insurance provides "preventive" healthcare that reduces the overall cost of medicine. This is at best a dubious proposition.