Fox News' Mike Huckabee spoke today at the Values Voters Summit, and offered some folksy, old-fashioned mockery of sick people unable to pay for medical care or obtain health insurance. According to Huckabee, it makes no sense for health insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions because auto insurers wouldn't cover an already-wrecked car and property insurers would cover and already-burnt house. While you try to figure out how joking about denying care to the sick conforms to the Christian values allegedly celebrated at the Values Voters Summit, I'd like to try and explain something to the good ex-governor that seems rather obvious... because it is.

Human beings are not cars.

Let's explore this concept for a moment. Huckabee would have us believe that health insurers should have obligations akin to those expected of car and property insurers. After all, it's all insurance, right? Yes, but no. You have to look at the commodity being insured. Auto insurers are not expected to cover already-wrecked vehicles for the simple reason that cars, expensive as they may be, are replaceable, either with new cars or public transportation or telecommuting or bicycles or whatever. Same thing with houses.

Health, on the other hand, is different. There is a strong societal interest in maintaining good health, for the simple reason that if you don't you die. There is a moral aspect to health and medicine that is simply not present when dealing with cars and houses. Telling someone “sorry, we're not going to cover the repairs to your Daewoo” is very different from “sorry, we're not going to cover your chemotherapy.”

And that's what makes the denial of coverage based on preexisting conditions so odious. But, if you're like Huckabee and you see no difference between a cancer patient and wrecked Jag, then it all becomes quite hilarious.