by In a surprising report issued recently, The House Energy and Commerce Committee examined the market for individual insurance policies. They found that the four top for-profit health insurers in the U.S. actually denied coverage to 1 out of every 7 applicants from 2007 to 2009. Their rejection of these potential customers was due to their medical histories and pre-existing conditions.Obama’s Health Care Reform Law prohibits selectivity of this sort. Beginning in 2014, insurers will have to offer coverage to every applicant and will not be allowed to charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing medical conditions.In addition, the law requires that all American adults obtain coverage, so that a situation doesn’t arise where healthy people only buy policies when they need expensive treatments.Certainly, in many ways, this reform makes sense. Spreading risk, rather than concentrating it, is the best economical and social approach to health coverage. The coverage guarantee in the healthcare reform law makes perfect sense in this way, by spreading the risk across the market while simultaneously ensuring and requiring coverage for everyone – whether they need it at that moment or not.
