March 28, 2012 by David K. Sutton
Romney Fails On Pre-Existing Condition Question From Leno
Mitt Romney has no good answers for how to deal with pre-existing conditions in an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Tuesday night. If Romney becomes president and is successful (along with congress) in repealing the Affordable Care Act, he is apparently fine with people being denied insurance coverage due to a pre-existing condition.
Romney said people who have been continuously insured can continue to get insurance even with a pre-existing condition. Thanks Romney, but that’s not the problem. The problem is people who have not been continuously insured or never insured. Romney had a less than satisfactory answer for this scenario saying, “we can’t play the game like that”. Hmm, I didn’t know health care was a game.
Romney’s response to Leno on health care insurance and pre-existing conditions is a perfect case for the individual mandate (which is being argued before the Supreme Court). In fact, it’s actually a great argument for single payer (i.e. Medicare for all).
No doubt a person who has never had insurance and has a pre-existing condition would be expensive to insure, so expensive that private, for-profit insurance companies regularly denied insurance in these cases before “Obamacare”. It just doesn’t make good business sense to insure somebody with that kind of risk. It’s not profitable. And there it is…the profit motive. That’s the problem with our current health care finance system, even with the Affordable Care Act in place. The solution to this problem is to spread the risk over the entire population of the country. If you have single payer (Medicare for all) the cost per person would be reduced while at the same time offering health care coverage to every single American.
Why is it that the most obvious solution to rising health care costs and lack of coverage eludes so many people in this country?
dks
