I find it amazing that anyone could survive in this country to the age of 55 with this level of shortsightedness and self-absorption. Allow me to clue Margaret Davis and so many other feebleminded folks into reality – companies, including insurance companies, exist to make money. If they do not make money, they cannot continue to exist, because their creditors and shareholders will liquidate them. The principal way they make money is by pooling risk, which they do through very sophisticated analysis. If they refuse to take premiums from a potential customer at any cost, it is because that sophisticated analysis has revealed that literally no premium would be adequate to cover for the potential risk posed by that potential customer, not because the company has some irrational prejudice against cancer patients/morbidly obese people/whatever.

So when the country passes a law that mandates that private companies cover these people in spite of the fact that they pose unacceptably high risk, the insurance company has only one choice – spread out some of that risk (in the form of drastically increased premiums) to the rest of us. A world in which the government mandates that insurance companies insure everyone no matter what and that they’re not allowed to drastically increase premiums to respond to this mandate is a world in which private insurance companies cease to exist probably in less than 12 months.