Originally Posted by Riot

Private insurance companies do exactly that. They can even take it back after they sign a contract to do so and you've paid them. They can even take it back after they have said they would pay. They can drop an insured at any time, at their whim, as there are no laws to hold them to their side of the contract. The majority of bankruptcies in America are due to insured people paying for healthcare (google, Dell, it's everywhere).

In this, the wealthiest and most generous of countries, where all are created equal, we have thousands of our citizens getting extremely ill and dying every year because they cannot get regular basic health coverage, or they are ill and their insurance company pulls the rug out from under them and they lose their savings and their house and all they worked for their entire life.

And that is why decades have been spent trying to get health care reform instituted. Thank goodness there is a real chance of that.