Health insurance for pre existing conditions

Health Insurance for preexisting conditions is an extraordinarily important aspect of insurance coverage. Because private health insurances are primarily interested in a profit motive, it does not benefit them to insure people with conditions that over a lifetime will be costly to their bottom line. Yet there is a moral and societal cost to let people be disenfranchised from health insurance coverage. Except for the very rich, everybody is vulnerable to going bankrupt when they are faced with a debilitating preexisting condition. How can this dilemma be resolved so that both insurance companies survive and society can fulfill its moral obligations to its citizens?

To answer this question, it is necessary to look at how advanced Western European countries have resolved the problem. While different countries have all come up with different solutions to their health care system, they all have in common that they mandate their citizens to have health insurance. Why this is so has to do with economies of scale and the distribution of risk when you can include in your pool not only people with preexisting conditions, but also young, healthy people. Young, healthy, people have little incentive to be in an health insurance pool unless they are mandated to do so. Once they are in the pool, not only are they protected by unforeseen catastrophic circumstances but they average out the risk for their less healthy brethren.



Mandated coverage has become a political hot potato, with Republican presidential candidates decrying it as "socialism." Yet not so long ago, conservatives viewed mandated coverage through the lens of the conservative principal of responsibility to society. The Heritage Foundation endorsed mandated health insurance coverage, as did both the current front runner in the Republican presidential primaries, Mitt Romney, and his chief rival Newt Gingrich. Romney critiques President Obama for his mandate by the hair splitting argument that while a mandate is good on the state level, it is not good on a national level. Gingrich also seems mainly petulant and pedantic about the fact that a Democratic president has implemented the very ideas he once supported.

But the ultimate arbitrator of whether or not coverage of preexisting conditions will remain a part of the birthright of all American citizens are the American people themselves. Once people see that this benefits them, or their relatives, it will become a part of the psyche and expectation of all people. Politicians who want to take away this most important right will do so at their peril. This is the way with every social advance: at first there is an outcry that the collapse of civilization is imminent if this law is passed. Then the law is passed, civilization survives and indeed is greatly improved, and people wonder how they survived without the law in the first place.