The new issue of National Affairs, the excellent journal edited by my EPPC colleague Yuval Levin, includes a piece that I wrote with Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute. The focus of the piece is the problem of pre-existing conditions:
The health-care legislation enacted this spring followed more than a year of heated, rancorous debate. But rather than subdue the public’s passions, the bill’s passage has only stoked them. Opposition to the new law remains very high, and Republicans have made clear their intention to push for its repeal if they gain control of Congress and the White House in 2010 and 2012.
For their part, President Obama and other champions of the legislation insist that public attitudes will soon change. More Americans will come to appreciate the law, they argue, once people have a better grasp of its benefits. And foremost among these benefits is the law’s prohibition of “pre-existing condition” exclusions in health insurance — which would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to customers with serious medical problems.
Like most of the health-care bill’s major provisions, this ban will not take full effect until 2014. But the mere prospect of finally addressing the “pre-existing condition problem” is held up as an enormous selling point of the law. At long last, the bill’s advocates claim, America has a solution to a profound failing of our current system — a solution that will eliminate a source of worry for millions, and that opponents would not dare undo. Indeed, while describing the plight of a young woman in the audience at a rally he attended in April, Obama told the crowd: “If [opponents of the law] want to look at Lauren Gallagher in the eye and tell her they plan to take away her father’s ability to get health insurance … they can run on that platform.”
The president’s dramatic talents notwithstanding, the choice he presents is a false one. We do not face an either-or showdown between cruelly denying sick people treatment and a massive new federal health-insurance entitlement. The problem of covering Americans with pre-existing conditions is certainly real, but the notion that the only way to solve it is through a massive transformation of America’s health-care system — one that will increase costs, raise taxes, displace millions of the happily insured, create a new entitlement, and undermine our private insurance sector — is simply wrong.
The case for repealing the newly enacted law, then, is not that there are no problems to solve in American health care. Rather, it is that there are far better solutions available….
The entire piece can be found here.