Pre-existing Ignorance

I did not know this. [Link]

That line involves, first of all, the notion that Obamacare is simply the definition of health-care reform, and that to oppose it means to not want to solve the problems with our system. Reporters are therefore surprised anytime a Republican expresses the desire to solve those problems, and they assume that means he must want to keep Obamacare. They have no idea, for instance, that numerous Republicans in recent years have backed proposals (like this one) that would be likely to get us much closer to universal coverage than Obamacare (which after all CBO says will leave 30 million people uninsured) at far lower cost.

And this line involves, secondly, the notion that the little things Obamacare has started to do (including constraining the exclusion of pre-existing conditions by insurance companies) are the essence of Obamacare, so that to oppose Obamacare is just to oppose these.

The fact is that all of the rules and requirements that have gone into effect before Obamacare really gets going in 2014 are just little bones thrown to the public to distract voters from what Obamacare is all about. The pre-existing condition question, which is so prominent in the rhetoric of Obamacare’s champions, is a perfect example of this. Pre-existing condition exclusions have been illegal in the employer-based insurance market (where the vast majority of privately insured people get their coverage) since the mid-1990s, so they only affect people who are in the individual market or who have gone without insurance for a time. Even in those situations, such exclusions are prohibited in many instances, and are not practiced by insurers in most others, though not all. About 2 to 4 million people are estimated to be vulnerable to such exclusions (though not all of them are in circumstances that mean they actually experience them). That’s roughly 1% of the population. That doesn’t mean their problem is unimportant (or that other people shouldn’t be worried about finding themselves in that group in the future), but rather it means that it can be solved without spending $2 trillion, raising taxes by nearly a trillion, taking $716 billion out of Medicare to fund a new unsustainable entitlement, imposing layers upon layers of new bureaucracies and regulations between people and their medical care, causing millions of families to lose the coverage they have now, and undermining employment, investment, and medical research. The idea that Obamacare is about dealing with pre-existing condition exclusions or keeping 26-year-olds on their parents’ insurance is just plain nonsense.