What's wrong with health care reform?

Jill Lawrence has this article at Politics Daily on 10 wrong reasons to oppose health care reform.

Read it and tell me where she is incorrect if you think so.

As I see it, there are three conditions ...

... that have to go hand in hand to reform our health care system. The fact that the three are intertwined is one reason that an incremental approach cannot work. It is these three, or the whole reform is unworkable.

First, everyone has to be able to purchase coverage. That means everybody gets it, even those with pre-existing conditions and no kicking sick people off. Universal coverage will cause the insurance companies to have to cover sick people which will increase their costs. That leads us to the second condition.

Mandates requiring that all citizens have health insurance is the second condition. If everyone must have health insurance, not just when you get sick, then we all bear the costs of the health insurance system and it is there for us when we get sick or hurt. We all pay in, even while we are healthy, so the insurance companies can afford to cover the sick or injured. Otherwise, given my first point, only those who are or get sick would be in the system.

Which brings me to the third condition. Those people who cannot afford health insurance will have to be subsidized by the rest of us. The reform will have to have some sort of means testing so that people who cannot afford the mandated coverage are still able to get insurance and participate in the system.

These three conditions are all necessary for the whole thing to work at all. The system I described above will look familiar to many of you. It is the system that has been adopted and is in force in Massachusetts today. It was proposed and enacted under the wild eyed socialist governor, Willard Romney. Is it perfect? No, but it is covering almost every Bay State citizen and the costs, while high, have not bankrupted the treasury. I think the missing link is that our Commonwealth is not and probably cannot do enough to control costs to make a big difference in rates. Our state is small in population and size, and cost control within our borders would result in providers shifting out of the area. A national program would solve that.

The current health care reform package would go a long way toward getting the country to the three conditions I mention.