The comparison between paying to fixing a leaky pipe and paying to fix your body is invalid, at best. Leaky pipes don't fix themselves, unlike the human body. If I paid a doctor every time I had a leaky nose, I'd be spending a lot of unnecessary money. When you don't have health insurance, this is what you believe: You believe the condition will resolve itself. You think if you just drink some orange juice, or whatever, it'll go away, eventually. You believe this for running noses. And you believe this for aches in the groin area. You believe because you have to believe it. Because the alternative could be foreclosure, bankruptcy.
And so, you wait and wait and wait. And when the pain intensifies, rather than subsides, you hobble into the emergency room and receive treatment for which you'll never be able to pay. So guess who pays it: We do.
We, the healthy. The ones who eat right. The ones who get check-ups. The ones who exercise and don't smoke. We pay for it with higher premiums. That's socialized medicine at its worst. We're paying for both the multi-million dollar salaries of the HMO CEOs and for the health care of the uninsured. That's the middle class squeeze.
So forgive my absolute dismay when I see people standing up at town halls and fighting, absolutely fighting, for the lavish lifestyles of the CEOs who control their health care. Forgive me for my bewilderment at the people who cursed the banking CEOs for the excessive compensations they received, but who now believe the HMO CEOs lavish compensation is essential to the free-market, to capitalism, to socialism and somehow to God.
Who are these people?

(Oh and one other thing: We pay auto insurance to drive on roads that are publicly owned. That's a big different.)