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Article snippet: The “Consumer Freedom Amendment” Sen. MORE (R-Texas) has offered to the Senate healthcare bill would make access to healthcare more secure for patients who develop expensive conditions. Critics of the amendment fail to understand how health insurance markets work. The Cruz amendment would allow individuals to opt out of ObamaCare’s costly health-insurance regulations — but only if insurers simultaneously offered ObamaCare-compliant plans to all comers, including patients with preexisting conditions. Sen. , “If it … has the effect of annihilating the pre-existing condition requirement that we have in the existing bill, then obviously I would object to that.” In fact, it is the “preexisting condition requirement” these senators want to protect that is jeopardizing access to care for the sick. ObamaCare’s preexisting-conditions provisions are no more than government price controls. These “community rating” price controls force insurers to charge all enrollees of a given age the same premium, regardless of health status. But forcing insurers to charge healthy people more, and sick people less, than they cost to cover creates more problems than it solves. ADVERTISEMENT Thousands of years of experience have shown government price controls only make matters worse. As former Clinton and Obama economic advisor Larry Summers warns, “price and exchange controls inevitably create harmful economic distortions. Both the distortions and the economic damage get worse with t... Link to the full article to read more