"Obamacare's Bait & Switch"

Another interesting column on health care reform by Cato's Michael D. Tanner:

President Obama has stopped talking about "health-care reform." The new poll-tested phrase of the day is "health-insurance reform. Specifically the president says he wants to protect people with "pre-existing conditions." He would require insurance companies to accept anyone who applies for coverage, regardless of their current health (a rule known as "guaranteed issue") and prohibit them from charging higher premiums to people who are sick (called "community rating").

But if that's what the president wants, he could already have a bill through Congress, with significant Republican support. In fact, even the insurance companies have agreed to it.

But the 1,017-page bill making its way through the House devotes all of six pages to insurance reform — 30 pages, if you count all the definitions and supporting provisions, still less than 3 percent of the bill.

So why the bait and switch?

Read the whole thing. One interesting thing about the rest is Tanner's reference to what happened when a few states adopted guaranteed issue and community rating. There's a lot of experience from the states with various reforms; in my view, both the Left and the Right should be discussing that experience more.