If you needed proof as to why health care reform was the right thing to do, look no further than the health insurance industry's first official comment after the bill was signed. In the first year, the bill requires that insurers provide coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Children! But an insurance industry spokesperson said that their reading of the bill indicated the exact opposite and they were not required to offer such coverage.
This sort of self-serving splitting of the semantic fine hair is typical of insurance companies. Looking for any pretext to refuse coverage or deny claims is their default setting. But in this case, their hasty and ill-conceived statement conjured images of sick, suffering, uninsured kids and even the most hard-hearted Scrooges on the right had to admit that the insurance industry's interpretation was a little, shall we say, cruel.
So, in a spasm of furious back-pedalling and spinning, industry representatives issued a "clarification" -- that they were merely pointing out that the bill's language was a bit fuzzy, that they of course would honor the spirit of the law and cover these helpless little children, and that they never had the slightest intention of refusing them coverage.
Oh, fuckin' sure!!
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