WHAT, THERE'S NO MORALS CLAUSE?:

Redistributing health: The public is catching on (ALAN REYNOLDS, October 12, 2009, NY Post)

PROPONENTS of compul sory, government-designed health insurance can't seem to understand why others disagree. Perhaps the public is realizing that these proposals are fundamentally about redistributing health?

Health-care "reform," that is, aims to shift costs and benefits of health insurance from some groups to others. And the losers are turning out to be less docile than politicians had hoped.

All the leading proposals involve massive redistribution from people with healthy lifestyles to those who take more risks. As the Congressional Budget Office explained, "Premiums in the new insurance exchanges would tend to be higher than the average premiums in the current-law individual market . . . because the new policies would have to cover pre-existing medical conditions and could not deny coverage to people with high expected costs for health care."

At a minimum, insurance companies should not be required to cover pre-existing conditions resulting from alcohol, tobacco, sex, and obesity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 13, 2009 2:24 PM