Changing the Game: “Health Insurance Reform” Means Making Sure Only the Government Can Win « NewsReal Blog

Changing the Game: “Health Insurance Reform” Means Making Sure Only the Government Can Win « NewsReal Blog

This is a "pre-existing condition."

If you watch cable news at all, you’ve seen the ads for health care reform, now called health insurance reform. Certainly we have, over and over and over again. They range in content from this blatantly offensive ad from the AARP:

… to the seemingly benign ad from Americans for Stable Quality Care (an astroturf group funded by SEIU, PhRMA, and the American Medical Aassociation — all big-money Obama supporters):

Now, this second ad makes some good points. Insurance companies dropping patients because they get sick is not a practice we support. But notice how the ad conflates that practice with refusing to cover people who have pre-existing conditions.

This ad is funded by smart people (some of them, anyway): doctors, lawyers, pharmaceutical manufacturers. So we doubt that they don’t know what a preexisting conditions actually are, or how they factor into insurance rates. We can safely say that this ad is intentionally misleading.

Let’s take a short look at the definition of insurance:

the act, system, or business of insuring property, life, one’s person, etc., against loss or harm arising in specified contingencies, as fire, accident, death, disablement, or the like, in consideration of a payment proportionate to the risk involved.

Health insurance is not a “get-out-of-medical-payments-free” card.