[thulldud]

...mandate all health insurers take people with pre-existing conditions, thereby spreading the risk out evenly to everyone....

That is what Obamacare is doing now, which is exactly why it is broken. That is not "insurance" — insurance is effectively made illegal.

If you are born with some degenerative disease or something like that, you shouldn't be penalized.

If you have "something like that", I (and all your other neighbors) should be penalized instead.

Got it. Socialism in a nutshell.

[timestax]

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[Old Teufel Hunden]

"If you have "something like that", I (and all your other neighbors) should be penalized instead."

Well then, you really don't understand how health insurance worked before Obamacare did you? I'm male and my wife and I are in our fifties, why do we need insurance with maternity and children type of coverage? Why does my wife need insurance for prostate cancer? Why do I need insurance for breast cancer? Is that so my wife and I can be penalized?

Before Obamacare, in order for insurance companies to get licensed they had to provide Medicare and/or Medicaid services, do you think that's going away? Or perhaps we'll just throw grandpa and grandma (who paid into Medicare for their whole life BTW) overboard? There are going to be regulations, you can count on it.

No matter what comes up, if you didn't force insurance companies to cover medicare, then once you turned 65 you would be paying unbelievable premiums, no matter what they come up with in competition. The facts are that everyone over 65 uses the doctor more and that's bad for business in the health insurance industry. It's economics 101, not socialism. Other insurance industries work the same way. If you want a license to practice, you will have to take a certain amount of high risk people in your insurance policy.