Curing the Pre-Existing Conditions of ObamaCare

The Obama administration’s emphasis on pre-existing conditions is aimed at creating the false impression that the only way to cover anyone who might become seriously ill is with ObamaCare’s heavy-handed and government-centric requirements.

Families USA, an advocacy group closely aligned with the Obama administration, recently claimed that 25 percent of non-elderly Americans, or 65 million people, suffer from a pre-existing condition that would threaten the security of their health insurance if it were not for ObamaCare’s protections.
This preposterous claim fits a pattern. ObamaCare’s apologists have been trying for three years to divert the public’s attention away from the trillion-dollar entitlement expansion, tax hike, and power grab by the federal government that ObamaCare represents. The emphasis on pre-existing conditions is aimed at creating the false impression that the only way to cover anyone who might become seriously ill is with ObamaCare’s heavy-handed and government-centric requirements.
This is nonsense. The country does not need ObamaCare to solve the relatively limited problem of restrictive insurance coverage for pre-existing health conditions. Nonetheless, it remains crucial for ObamaCare’s opponents to embrace a sensible fix. Apparent lack of a clear alternative should not provide an excuse for retaining the entirety of the ObamaCare edifice.
Size Matters
The starting point for addressing the problem of pre-existing conditions is a proper perspective on its size. The claim that tens of millions of Americans are at risk of losing coverage defies common sense. ObamaCare included $5 billion in new funding to subsidize insurance for the millions who were supposedly sick and without options. Far from the alleged 65 million people, only 77,877 had signed up for the subsidized Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan by June 30 of this year. The truth is that most Americans with health problems are protected by rules passed years ago by Congress and state legislatures that prohibit discrimination against them in job-based insurance. Not surprisingly, those employer plans pay for hundreds of billions of dollars of claims each year—from workers with “pre-existing” health conditions.

Read more: http://www.american.com/archive/2012/september/curing-the-pre-existing-conditions-of-obamacare