To ask insurance companies to cover a patient after the tumor is diagnosed is to ask them to take on a known expense. Combine that with another Obama demand: that insurance companies can’t charge higher rates for those who are at higher risk of getting sick. So if insurance companies have to take on a known expense and can’t charge a higher rate for it, how are they going to pay for it? By raising everyone else’s rates, redistributing their wealth to the new freeloaders.

This isn’t insurance, it’s welfare. And that’s the whole point…

Government regulations and enormous government spending have already distorted the health-care market for decades, but this legislation is the coup de grace. Its whole point—even in the watered-down form favored by the “Blue Dog” Democrats—is to force insurance companies to act as if they are government welfare agencies. And when the insurance companies collapse under that artificial burden, the government will drop the pretense and have the welfare agencies, under the banner of the “public option,” take over.

This is a war on health insurance. But it is more than that. The deeper issue is individualism versus collectivism.