I’m saying that if you’ve been previously treated for cancer, and fail to disclose that fact when applying to a new company for coverage, that’s a material omission and they are justified in canceling your contract.
As opposed to failing to disclose you were once treated for acne.
I know a guy in Canada who was trying to deny to himself that he had colon cancer. He eventually received treatment because the clinic staff told him to get to the hospital pronto, he tried to put off the appointment and they gave him hell and said he had better show up!
On the other hand, if you tell the truth and say you were treated for cancer, they’ll just deny you right then and there. Either way, you’re fucked.
American healthcare would be a joke if it wasn’t so tragic. I really don’t understand why so many people are against a single-payer/government run system. I mean, look at all those other countries that have it! All the people hate their healthcare! Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia…yeah, nothing but complaints from them, right? :rolleyes:
People not seeking treatment for a simple, but potentially life-threatening, condition because they can’t pay $100 for a damn checkup, and $50 for some pills is not acceptable! If you honestly feel it’s ok for someone to die because they can’t spare $150 out of pocket, you’re an inhuman monster.
Unfortunately, we seem to have a lot of inhuman monsters in this country.
It would seem that a cancer survivor who needs to find a new insurance company is pretty effectively screwed then. He has some options:
In countries with single-payer government insurance, the cancer survivor does not have to worry about being treated for a recurrence of the disease. He pays his premiums and is covered for his healthcare. Period. No rescission, no denial of coverage, no debt-collectors hanging about in ER departments. No fighting with insurance companies to pay what they owe. No bouncing of claims back and forth for months.
In the case of Robin Beaton, the woman denied coverage for a mastectomy because of the acne medication, her insurance was reinstated 5 months later, only after her congressional representative went to bat for her. By that time, her cancer had more than doubled in size, making her treatment necessarily much more invasive and extensive.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t repost Bricker’s previous foray into the inhuman monster camp:
It is acceptable for people to die because they can’t afford the proper treatment.
I believe he later said something along the lines, that he meant that if it costs 900 billion dollars to give a 98 year old man three extra seconds of life, it’s okay.
The boy has a genius for the back-pedal. If they’d let him do the Tour de France riding backwards, Lance Armstrong wouldn’t stand a chance.
And all of this, mind you, is one hundred percent legal and Constitutional!
See, people from other countries tell them that they love their government-run healthcare, but Fox News tells them that people in other countries hate their government-run healthcare. And who are you going to believe, a bunch of foreigners, or the Fair and Balanced[sup]TM[/sup] news source?
That fair and balanced news source is owned by a bunch of foreigners. So which bunch of foreigners are you going to believe? 
The one that aligns with your preconceived ideas, of course!
And what Jesus would want if he returned today!
When I changed jobs, and thus group plans, I got coverage without having to tell my new insurer anything. I know that this is not true for individual plans. You realize that the current system gives an incentive for people to lie about their health status? And that this might carry over to the medical history they give to their doctors? And that unless there is a law requiring insurers to take anyone, there are good business reasons to reject people with a history of illness?
Sure, but that’s just the free market doing it’s thing, so what’s the problem?
Well, if you had been using good Capitalist Christian health care instead of your godless socialist health care you would have been in a church on Easter Sunday instead of a hospital.
And while that makes no sense, I think I’ve proven my point.
Using his own gray-is-black-if-I-say-so “reasoning,” any reasonable person would conclude that the Brick has lost his bet:
Oh, would the SDMB be delighted if you were actually a man of your word. 
To quote an oft used phrase around here, “He’s smart. We’re right. Sooner or later, he’s ours.”
I think there’s a reasonable point there, although I don’t have the energy to dive into that entire thread. Suppose we had single-payer government run healthcare, something like Canada or England or Australia (which I support, and which it sounds like you support). The system presumably only has a finite amount of money to spend, which means that not everyone who wants it to treat everything is always going to get treated. Which means, almost by definition, there will be situations in which someone is denied potentially life-saving treatment purely for financial reasons. Now, if the system is well-designed it will in fact be extreme cases where there’s both a very high financial cost and a very low gain in terms of quality of life, and goodness knows such as system would have VASTLY fewer people die from lack of healthcare than our current system, but let’s not kid ourselves, to run such a system you basically HAVE to put financial values on human lives.
My understanding is in Britain they have the NICE program that evaluates comparative effectiveness, and they cover treatments up to about $40,000 a year in Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY). So a cancer drug that costs $100k and adds 6 months will not fall under that equation, but most everything else will (I think). My impression is as long as the procedure averages out to $40,000 a year or less in quality adjusted life years you are ok.
Plus I believe in the UK if you do decide on a treatment that is above the QALY calculation, the UK will pay the first 40k or so of it and you pay the rest.
Plus the UK has lower costs for medicine and physician services, so even if it is over 40k (or whatever the cutoff is, it is around 40k USD), you are still paying far less than you would here.
So rationing is necessary. It is just what kind of rationing do you want.