MARIA BARTIROMO (HOST): James, lay out the issue for us in terms of pre-existing conditions.
JAMES FREEMAN (THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR): Yeah, so, the idea is, you don't want to let people buy insurance on their way to the hospital. This would be the argument to say, let's have an insurance market. If you are sick already, you don't need insurance. You need health care. So you need a system that allows people to get the care they need, but if you're going to have an insurance market, they have to be able to sell to healthy people, not just sick people, and so that's the theory.
Now, the president has said he doesn't want to change anything with pre-existing conditions. That wasn't changed, obviously. The Republicans never rewrote Obamacare. So, it's kind of a phony issue in that way.
But, to me, and I don't know if you're hearing from patients, this issue of the Medicare for all plan, which ends Medicare and ends private insurance, in other words, it ends all pre-existing coverage. Every person in the United States -- this is the plan that most Democrats in the House have endorsed, Bernie Sanders, a lot of Senate candidates. It ends all coverage in the U.S. and creates a new government plan. What does that mean for patients?
