--- On Mon, 8/17/09, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
> Assumption 2: The plan on offer will make an epochal
> change. It will establish health care as a right in a
> country that thinks in terms of rights. It was make it
> impossible for people to get dumped because of pre-existing
> conditions or because they get sick. It will make it a
> norm against which all future proposals will be judged that
> everyone should be covered.
>
[WS:] What makes you think that this will happen i.e. that a provision prohibiting cherry picking will emerge from the current round of 'reform?' If the industry is putting a fierce fight against government competition, it will put an ever fiercer fight against cherry picking prohibition. Cheery picking is the _only_ way how private health insurers can be profitable - without that it is either government subsidies (and strings attached to such subsidies) or going belly up altogether.
BTW, I like your argument, but I am not as optimistic. As the Old Man said "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." The history of 70 or so years of failure to enact any national and universal social program except social security, let alone any substantial change of the political-institutional framework carved out 200 years ago by plantation owners and merchants speaks volumes of the remarkable resistance of the US system to any change that threatens business interest.
Wojtek