(Even) more on health care: pre-existing conditions
Earlier tonight, during a longish tweet-debate on health care, my buddy @airbeat wrote:
*And* insurance companies can’t turn people away for preexisting conditions, or cut off benefits when they get sick. Win/win
He and I disagree pretty consistently on political and philosophical issues and this remark underscores with remarkable clarity what one of those disagreements is… so I responded:
Why is is good to force insurance companies to insure pre-existing conditions? I can’t explain how silly that is in only 144 chars.
Here is my explanation, now that I have enough room.
For as long as he’s been pushing this reform, President Obama has said that he wants to do away with the ability of health insurance companies to deny coverage of pre-existing conditions. This seems silly to me… downright foolish, actually.
You see, health insurance is a bet. When you purchase it (or any insurance, really), youre betting the house (the insurance company) that something bad is going to happen to you. When you buy life insurance, you bet that you’re going to die. Auto insurance is a bet that you are going to require auto repair and/or protection from liability… and health insurance is a great big bet that you’re going to get so horribly sick that you won’t be able to pay for your care. If you lose (like most of us want to), then the house keeps your bet (the premiums you paid them). If you are lucky enough to get sick, have an accident or die prematurely, you win the jackpot and the payout is far more than you paid in premiums.
With that understanding, isn’t it obvious why health insurance companies don’t want to cover pre-existing conditions? If a bleeding man walked into United Healthcare’s offices and asked for a health insurance policy, they would insist that his current injuries not be covered by the bet they were agreeing to take. This is reasonable, right?
(It is if you see insurance companies through the lens of realpolitik, as companies interested in providing a reasonable service for a reasonable fee. If, however, you see them as evil entities out to ruin people’s lives, than this analogy isn’t going to get us anywhere closer to understanding one another.)
The new health care bill proposes to force insurance companies to sell insurance to anyone… presumably even a three-pack-a-day smoker with a death wish and high cholestorol. Under these circumstances, would you purchase health insurance before you felt sick?
Of course not. If the company had to sell you insurance no matter how ill you were, why would you buy insurance before you needed it? To return to our betting analogy, you would wait until just after the Yankees built up a five run lead and put Rivera on the mound before placing your bet on the outcome of the game!
But wait. The proposal has a solution for that. The plan requires everyone to buy health insurance. And if you don’t… -wait for it- you will be fined and/or imprisoned. It’s all spelled out in pages 297-299 (link) if you don’t believe me (look for Section 59B, called “TAX ON INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT ACCEPTABLE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE”).
In other words, the government is going to get into the insurance business, undercut private companies on price and then require every single citizen to purchase insurance, under threat of fine and imprisonment.
Does that sound like a really good idea to you?
Does that sound like a really American idea to you?
This is just one of the many, many problems I have with the Affordable Health Care for America Act.
I have said this before and I will say it again: I agree that our current health care system is broken. But this proposal is not the solution. It is a case of an activist, Leftist President taking advantage of an opportunity to to remake America into what he feels it should be. It’s foolhardy, it’s happening much too fast and it’s bad for all of us, in both the long and short terms.
