My state, NC, is letting the Feds do it and doesn't have it's own. A recent newspaper article says that we are paying an additional 3.5% fee on our insurance policies paid to the fed that would not be there if we had a state exchange.

And to reply to my own post, on the whole wki page that I cite, there is a single Cat 3 storm mentioned hitting NY. Not much data to draw a pattern from. Since you mention Robert Moses State Park, which is not in NYC, you must be looking at all of Long Island. If you expand to include Cat 2 you will find storms from

1904 (unnamed)
1960 (Donna)
1985 (Gloria)
1991 (Bob)

Sounds like strong hurricanes hitting the NY coast are getting more frequent.

Cite your sources

According to this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_hurricanes the storm of 1893 was cat 1 and Hurricane Hazel in 1954 created the strongest winds measured in NYC. It doesn't look like a clear trend of decreasing strength of hurricanes to me.

The main difference is that health care is *insurance*. Insurance only works when more people participate than actually need it (or take less money out than others). Can you imagine being in a skiing accident and needing $100k in medical bills and being the only participant in your medical policy. You'd have to pay $100k + overhead.

If only sick people were a part of the insurance then the costs for that care would be averaged out to only be paid by the sick people.

The question is, should healthy people be forced to subsidize the care of those that are chronically ill?

Nah, healthy people won't need coverage for skiing accidents or acute leukemia. And if they did then they'd be winners since they only participate in the healthy people's insurance pool which would have lower premiums than the sick people's pool.

Our newspaper, The News & Observer, had an expose last year on our elected state leaders (North Carolina) passing exemption after exemption over the last 12 years to certain specific industries to allow them to use overweight trucks on state roads. It was so bad that when the series of articles were published the author of one of the pending bills for a new industry to exempt defended the bill with something to the effect "it's available to all the other industries, it's unfair to not exempt this one".

This was a very good example of investigative reporting because it's also widely known that NC is only funding it's highway maintenance a fraction of what it needs to in order to maintain good roads. They published a substantial amount of analysis by road experts to show that the roads are heavily damaged by overweight vehicles.

These vehicles allowed on state roads were even overweight for federal roads and state roads are made substantially thinner than federal roads (thus saw more damage than an interstate would).
I think this was the best example of investigative reporting but it's not the only one. Articles like these are well worth the price of a subscription even if they occur infrequently.