In his opening remarks, the president really nailed the idea that this is about fixing health insurance for the people who have it. Almost nothing about the uninsured -- just the dangers of the under-insured. Really smart.
I mentioned this a couple of days ago, but it stands repeating. If you like the insurance you have now, you won't as soon as you actually need it. In other words: your health insurance sucks.
UPDATE after the jump...
This section was practically torn from scenes from SiCKO:
If you do the responsible thing, if you pay your premiums each month so that you are covered in case of a crisis, when that crisis comes, if you have a heart attack or your husband finds out he has cancer, or you son or daughter is rushed to the hospital -- at the time when you're most vulnerable and most frightened, you can't be getting a phone call from your insurance company saying that your insurance is revoked.It turns -- it turns out once you got sick, they scoured your records looking for reasons to cancel your policy. They find a minor mistake on your insurance form that you submitted years ago. That can't be allowed to happen. One report...(APPLAUSE)... one report found that three insurance companies alone had canceled 20,000 policies in this way over the past few years. One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer discovered he hadn't reported gallstones he didn't know about. True story. Because his treatment was delayed, he died.A woman from Texas was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, was scheduled for a double mastectomy. Three days before surgery, the insurance -- the insurance company canceled the policy, in part because she forgot to declare a case of acne. True story. By the time she had her insurance reinstated, the cancer had more than doubled in size.And this is personal for me. I'll never forget my own mother as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether the insurance company would refuse to pay for her treatment. The insurance company was arguing that she should have known that she had cancer when she took her new job, even though it hadn't been diagnosed yet. If it could happen to her, it could happen to any one of us.It's wrong. And when we pass health insurance reform, we're going to put a stop to it once and for all.