One of the things on most people's health care reform to-do list is fix the pre-existing condition problem. In real life, this problem is a lot smaller than it used to be. For the most part, so long as an individual has continuous health care coverage, he or she can change insurers and have any pre-existing conditions covered. The problem comes when the individual stops paying for health insurance and then develops a health problem. For obvious reasons, insurance companies aren't going to just start covering a person who is already sick or injured. That's like providing auto insurance after the crash. Fixing this problem isn't easy. Senator Claire McCaskill, speaking Wednesday about a scaled down health care bill, described the difficulty pretty clearly: Smaller packages are hard because they are all so interrelated. You can't do pre-existing conditions unless you do a mandate. And you can't do a mandate if you make insurance affordable. So someone has to explain it to me. Do...(Read Full Post)