Romney Justifies Denying Health Care To People With Pre-Existing Conditions: ‘We Can’t Play The Game Like That’
Article excerpt follows:
Romney Justifies Denying Health Care To People With Pre-Existing Conditions: ‘We Can’t Play The Game Like That’
By Alex Seitz-Wald
Mar 28, 2012
As Mitt Romney tries to distance himself from Obamacare, he ran into some trouble last night when he got stumped by comedian Jay Leno. Leno asked Romney what he would do to help people with preexisting medical conditions, who are often denied coverage today by insurance companies worried about increased costs.
Romney’s answer was essentially nothing. Someone who has forgone insurance doesn’t deserve to get medical coverage, Romney suggested, because, “we can’t play the game like that.” Asked what he would do to help people with pre-existing conditions, Romney replied:
ROMNEY: People with pre-existing conditions, as long as they have been insured before, they are going to be able to continue to have insurance.
LENO: Suppose they haven’t been insured before?
ROMNEY: Well, if they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it’s like, ‘Hey guys. We can’t play the game like that. You’ve got to get insurance when you are well and then if you get ill, you are going to be covered. [...]
We’ll look at a circumstance where someone is ill and hasn’t been insured so far, but people who have the chance to be insured –- if you are working in the auto business for instance, the companies carry insurance, they insure their employees, you look at the circumstances that exist –- but people who have done their best to get insured are going to be able to be covered. But you don’t want everyone saying, ‘I am going to sit back until I get sick and then go buy insurance.’ That doesn’t make sense. But you get defined rules and get people in who are playing by the rules.
Barring insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions is one of the Affordable Care Act’s most popular and important provisions. The problem, for Romney, is that this can only function when coupled with an individual mandate (as he well knows), the constitutionality of which the Supreme Court considered yesterday.
Without the mandate, healthy people could forego buying insurance until they became sick, thus driving up costs for everyone and potentially collapsing the system as there may not be enough people paying into the system to cover the costs of all the sick people. Moreover, there are people who, from a young age or even birth, have pre-existing conditions due to congenital diseases.
Under Romney’s current plan, since they have no existing history of coverage, it’s conceivable people born with pre-existing conditions would be completely unable to ever get insurance. Insurance companies have already said that without the mandate, they’d go back to denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
Romney himself seems to understand this, telling Leno, “you have to find rules that get people in” to the insurance market so they don’t freeride. A former governor of Massachusetts named Romney came up with just a such a rule — it’s called the individual mandate. But now that Romney is running for president for Pete’s sake, he hates mandates, and so he has literally nothing to offer people with pre-existing conditions expect for a scolding about how they should have purchased insurance earlier.
Read More: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/03/28/453474/...
The dinosaur had a pea size brain and couldn't control their extinction, but a republicon with a brain given to them by their holier than though God will cause their own extinction.
It's soo incredibly sad.
This is part of why a single-payer system is preferable--everybody pays taxes to fund it, and everybody gets access to health care.
The system can be reformed slightly to give people substantial tax credits for purchasing their own qualifying plan, and a steep tax penalty for going voluntarily uninsured. That's a mandate, too, but as a taxation enforcement, the individual mandate CAN be constitutional, if carefully written, regardless of the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling.
Of course, that requires bipartisanship in law-making.
So, we should make everyone get insurance to cover a product EVERYone will use at some point, instead of going to emergency rooms when their child has a fever. (FAR more expensive, and we pay for it)
Sounds reasonable to me.
No doubt.
Some of that is from doctors' fear of malpractice suits. But most is because neither docs nor patients have any incentive to be a little frugal. Tort reform would help with the doctors' motivation, but better incentives or controls would work better.