...was to force insurance companies to insure you despite "pre-existing conditions." Yet now the news is that the government will impose a "tobacco surcharge" if you smoke. Isn't that just like an insurance company turning you away if you're sick? The reason for excluding people with pre-existing conditions is because it makes no economic sense to insure people after the thing you're insuring them for has occurred. So insurance companies either charge more to people who engage in risky behavior or refuse to insure them entirely. This is a good thing, since it discourages risky behavior, but still allows people to choose it if they prefer--and doesn't force me to pay for someone else's bad habits. And it leaves insurance companies free to create different kinds of policies that insure greater categories of risk. This is the operation of supply and demand that leads to better quality products at low prices and which respects people's freedom to choose.
But in the run up to Obamacare, that was declared "discrimination" and wrong. Instead, insurance companies were supposed to just pay for treatment whenever you got sick, regardless of your circumstances. And because the laws of economics meant that such a requirement would bankrupt the insurance companies, we'd help subsidize the companies by forcing healthy people to buy insurance that they don't need.
Now, among Obamacare's many other failures, the government is going to allow insurance companies to charge people more if they smoke. Maybe that's a good idea--smoking's a bad idea, and we should discourage it...but isn't this just the same thing that we were supposed to eliminate? Isn't the government now engaged in exactly the same discrimination that we denounced three years ago? If they can charge more for smoking, what about being fat? What about driving unsafely? What about having cancer or heart disease?
We haven't eliminated the insurers' ability to deny or charge more to people with preexisting conditions--we've just transferred that ability to the government. With the result that we won't be able to shop elsewhere and create the kind of economic pressure that might otherwise lead insurance companies to innovate and devise alternatives.
This is the progression of every government program. Step one: offer people "free" widgets, paid for by taxpayer money. Step two: everyone goes out and gets too many widgets and drains the government treasury. Therefore, Step three: the government starts telling you what kinds of widgets you can get and why. And by that process, your access to widgets comes to depend on the decisions of the bureaucracy.
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