“How Health Care Reform Affects You.” Chances are you’ve seen an article along these lines pop up in your magazines of choice lately. I certainly have. Chances are the articles gloss over the major problems inherent in ObamaCare — if they’re not a straight out endorsement of the takeover.

Stephen Spruiell takes the latest incarnation of this problem to task over at NRO with “Real Simpletons: A popular magazine ignores the downside to Obamacare.”

My wife subscribes to Real Simple, a women’s-interest magazine specializing in articles on how to make life more organized. I often joke that our lives would be more organized if we didn’t have eight copies of Real Simple floating around the apartment at any given time. But since they are around, I’ll flip through them occasionally to see if there’s anything worth reading. And today, in the latest issue, I saw a short feature titled “How Health-Care Reform Affects You.”

The article reads like an advertisement for Obamacare. One would be forgiven for thinking it a part of the administration’s campaign to improve the legislation’s popularity. Here is a complete list of the article’s subheads:

More services will be paid for in full.
Lifetime limits are history.
Your children can remain on your policy until age 26.
Kids with preexisting conditions cannot be denied coverage.
Insurers have to spend more money on care.

That’s it: All good, no bad, and the only two sources quoted in the article represent non-profits who supported the legislation.

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The vote is done and we have awakened to a new era. Under the guise of  coverage for pre-existing conditions and the security of knowing that you can’t be kicked off your insurance when you really need it, the democrats have pushed through a bill which will lead to the end of health care as we know it.

Besides taxing us from everything from our unearned income, to payroll taxes to medical devices we can look forward to paying into a pot for the next four years. I only hope the money will be available for health care.  As it stands now, it will be used to set up yet another government bureaucracy run by various task forces and yet another Czar to oversee the entire mess. If we’re lucky they will actually use the money for the intended purpose, but I have visions of the social security lock box. It is hard to believe that this will end up any better than Medicare, The Post Office or Social Security – big, bloated and bankrupt.

The bill sets up committees to study ways to deliver care.  A committee to study what another committee is supposed to do? Sounds like bureaucracy at its finest. It is hard to believe that that money used to ‘study’ things will be used for patient care. By the time 2014 rolls around what money will be left to implement medical care?

The government sold health care reform with 5 basic talking points:

1.  You won’t be able to be kicked off of your insurance when you really need it

• Turns out that the insurance companies CAN kick you off if they pay a fine. It is not hard to imagine that an insurance company will figure out pretty quickly that it would be cheaper to pay the fine than to pay for coverage of a long term chronic illness.

2.  You won’t be denied medical care for pre-existing conditions.

• If the insurance company deems that you have lied on the application you will be denied coverage.
• Sick children are no longer considered to have pre-existing conditions, but what about women who are pregnant?

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The headline has changed from “health care reform” to “health insurance reform” because politicians can’t go wrong politically by firing salvos at health insurance companies.  People aren’t fond of the institutions that handle the majority of the money paid for health services even if they are happy with the care itself.   Unfortunately, calling the leading proposals in Congress insurance reform is false advertising.  The basic flaw is that insurance for medical expenses will no longer exist. 

If the Commissioner of Baseball announced “baseball reform” that included elimination of pitching, batting and fielding, we would no longer have baseball even if there was a ball and bases involved.  Similarly, the leading Congressional proposals violate key principles of insurance by prohibiting underwriting, pricing, and product design based on risk assessment.

Why does this matter?  Because the absence of a true insurance product and the lack of a private, competitive insurance market will mean that the program will not work as intended to provide improvements in affordability and availability of medical expense reimbursement. 

The essence of insurance is the transfer of risk and individual risk assessment for losses that for any given individual are unexpected and unpredictable.  As Sherlock Holmes explained to Dr. Watson in The Sign of the Four:

while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.  You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. 

Legislation that ignores the great detective’s words cannot rightly be called insurance.

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