Free Republic

Health Reform: ObamaCare's efforts to expand insurance coverage and bring down costs depend entirely on convincing young people to buy coverage, while the law gives these people every reason not to. A marketing presentation put together for the administration admits that convincing the young and healthy — who make up 48% of the uninsured — to buy insurance will be difficult, since they "take health for granted" and have a "low motivation to enroll." What it doesn't say is that ObamaCare will give them still more reasons not to buy insurance.

In his Wednesday speech, President Obama fired up the troops on the urgency of re ducing the number of uninsured in this country and achieving universal coverage via insurance regulations and forcing all Americans to buy insurance. Under his plan, insurers would be faced with "guaranteed issue" and "community rating." In other words, they wouldn't be allowed to deny insurance based on a pre-existing condition, take coverage away in the middle of a treatment, set a premium based on one's medical history or set lifetime caps on coverage. If there were a "guaranteed issue" law for fire insurance, no one...

PRESIDENT Obama and his allies are shifting their health-reform rhetoric into an attack on the insurance industry -- but their goal remains universal government health coverage. Speaking on Capitol Hill two weeks ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called America's health-insurance companies "immoral." "They are the villains in this," she said, referring to the industry's role on health-care reform. "They have been part of the problem in a major way." That broadside was foreshadowed by a subtler Obama shift during his July 22 press conference, when he repeatedly referred to his health-care plan as "insurance reform." Gone was his usual pitch...