If your insurance policy was cancelled because it did not comply with Obamacare’s standards (read: your insurance company couldn’t afford to maintain your coverage anymore), the Obama administration has a little Christmas miracle for you: you will be exempt from Obamacare’s contentious individual mandate, for the time being.

The Obama administration says that this will affect “fewer than 500,000” people (Isn’t that still more than have signed up for Obamacare on the crippled exchange site?), but it’s good news nonetheless. The individual mandate is probably the worst part of Obamacare (and that’s saying something).

To help put it in perspective, let’s pretend health insurance is something else, like tea. The civil government wants everyone to have tea. So it raises the price of tea for rich people, so it can give tea to poor people for free. Then it requires that everyone have tea. Tea makers can’t afford to make the same quality of tea and still make a profit, so they add dried mulch shreds into their blends. Then the civil government hides the tea exchanges so that hardly anyone can actually purchase tea from a government-approved distributor, and when poor people finally do get into the shops, most of them find out they would have been eligible for this same low-quality tea even before the civil government decided to radically alter its laws and spend trillions of dollars doing it. Bottom line: rich people are forced to buy a lower-quality product at higher prices, so that poor people can get tea they could have gotten anyway, while corrupt business interests and the civil government make even more money off of honest, hard-working Americans. At least the original American patriots weren’t forced to buy tea. And even still, they had had enough. Where’s our limit?

If this isn’t overreaching tyrannical demagoguery, I don’t know what is. Some might argue that my analogy doesn’t work because tea is not a necessity, but health insurance is. But health insurance is not a necessity. Hospitals were originally charitable institutions run by churches. Rich people paid for them so poor people wouldn’t have to. This was different from Obamacare in two central ways: First, it was voluntary. Second, it actually worked pretty well.

Aside from this, health insurance is made necessary by the currently ludicrous cost of healthcare. It shouldn’t be this expensive. It actually isn’t. Health insurance companies have made healthcare more expensive, and the civil government’s magically bottomless wallet has also inflated prices. Because where there is dead meat, there are vultures.

And saying that car insurance and health insurance are basically operating under the same principle is stupid. I have to buy car insurance so that other people’s property is protected from my errors of judgment. The more errors of judgment I make, the  more expensive my car insurance premiums become. The more risky my demographic, the higher my cost. Obamacare’s individual mandate works in an opposite way. Healthy people pay way more for worse health insurance, so that high-risk, low-income freeloaders can pay nothing. This would be like charging good drivers higher insurance premiums, so that sixteen-year-old, legally blind, speed demons with a history of traffic accidents could keep driving—for free and with impunity.

Over the course of many years, private, voluntary charity has given way to public, compulsory welfare. The results have been horrendous. I am at least happy about one thing. For the time being, a blow has been struck to the individual mandate. But in order for this disastrous piece of legislature to be fully destroyed, individuals need to begin investing voluntarily into effective charitable institutions.