Sob Story Fraud

Recently in a diatribe against insurance companies President Obama flashed a letter from a Ms. Natoma Canfield where she talked about her cancer and 8,000 per year health insurance premiums. The One claimed that his policies would end such 'abuses'. John Graham of the Pacific Research Institute points out the fraud (almost inevitable with this President) in Mr. Obama's argument. The money grafs:

The president's response to Mrs. Canfield should have gone something like this:

"I regret that the tax policies of the United States government make it impossible for health insurers to pool risks properly, like they do for life insurance. Life insurance policies, which are owned by individuals, offer fixed premiums.

If the government stopped discriminating against individual ownership of health insurance, instead of favoring employer ownership, health insurers would be able and motivated to offer insurance policies that guaranteed long-term premium increases no greater than the increase in overall medical costs. Unfortunately, because the median individual health-insurance policy only lasts for three years, people like yourself, who have had individual insurance for over a decade, lose the benefits of long-term risk pooling.

Furthermore, the House and Senate do not propose to solve this problem by removing the discrimination from the tax code. Rather, they substitute massive taxation and subsidies through 'exchanges' instead of effective risk-pooling.

Your letter has motivated me to abandon this approach, and instead reform the tax code so that the American people, not their employers or the government, chose their health insurance."