Our reform will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of your medical history. Nor will they be allowed to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. No one in America should go broke because they get sick.

I am sympathetic to this statement.

First off, I think “health care” in a misnomer. I think we’re really talking about health insurance. In terms of the actual care … we seem to be doing just great. The question is the insurance. That might be too semantic, but I think it’s important to clarify what we’re talking about.

There are many challenges our health insurance system faces beyond just the uninsured, which has been the focus on the debate recently (ie, the “public option”).

One of those problems is that people who are insured, who either buy insurance out of pocket (as I do) or have it through their employer, is that they can still end up getting stuck with the bill and going broke when they get sick. But health insurance should prevent that in the same way that home insurance prevents me from going broke if my home burns down or that car insurance buys me a new car if I wreck it.

The idea of some regulation about minimum benefits, maximum out-of-pocket, pre-existing conditions, etc–doesn’t seem such a bad idea or even that revolutionary.

Many industries have rules like this under which the companies compete … off the top of my head there are fuel and safety standards for the auto industry, SEC laws that prohibit certain behaviors like insider trading, the patent system (which dictates when competition over a certain idea or process can take place), or the FCC laws that say carriers can’t restrict the kind of data sent over their lines (like, say–the data of a competitor. And thank the Lord for those laws too because without them the Internet would look like a bunch of walled gardens with AT&T deciding if it would let Twitter or Hulu onto its cables).

I don’t want to wade into the end-of-life counseling or the “public option” questions, which are separate from this, but I’m curious if anyone has any experience in the health insurance world (again, as opposed to health care) that could shed more light on this for me.