Man is opposed to fair play — He wants it all and he wants it his way

Scocca has much more on the ridiculous Lori Gottlieb column I briefly discussed earlier today. Among its other problems, it’s the latest manifestation of the conservertarian war on the concept of insurance:

Maybe the reason that Gottlieb’s Facebook friends are not sympathetic toward her is that she is thoroughly unsympathetic. Under her new, intrusively excessive policy, she writes, “now if I have Stage 4 cancer or need a sex-change operation, I’d be covered regardless of pre-existing conditions.”

Yes, that’s right: the oppressive, thoughtless Obamacare rules require everyone to be covered even if they have such weirdo unlikely conditions as … cancer? As if!

What Gottlieb is discovering, belatedly, is how much it costs to buy real health insurance rather than fake health insurance. Cancer—this should be needless to say, yet it evidently is not—is a definitive example of why health insurance exists. The disease can strike, without warning, at any stage of life. Nobody sets aside money in the household budget as savings in case they might get cancer.

And it’s even worse than that, because she’s happy with the idea of other people paying for someone else’s unique needs…so long as she’s the beneficiary:

Age is only part of the reason Gottlieb isn’t interested in paying for maternity coverage. The other part is that she has already had a baby. Until recently, she was enrolled in a plan that did provide maternity coverage, which allowed her to get other people—people who were paying higher premiums for the option of having a child, but who were not yet going through the expense of pregnancy and childbirth—to subsidize her own pregnancy and childbirth.

So once she’d collected the benefit, it was time to unload the costs onto the other suckers and get a new policy.

And then, remember that she’s overestimating the cost increase because her research method consisted of “taking the assertions of self-interested insurers at face value.” When the Hall of Fame of self-refutation opens, Gottlieb will go in on the first ballot.