Insurance is a transfer of risk. You have risks in your life: you may hit someone with your car or someone may slip down your steps, someone may hit your car or a tree might fall on your house. So you transfer those risks to an insurance company. They charge you a fee in order to accept your risks. They now bare the burden of the potentials in exchange for the premium you pay them.
So, you cannot simply wait until you experience bad luck to get insurance. You can't hit the deer and then call and pay for insurance. That isn't transfer of risk, that is transfer of calamity and insurance isn't set up to cover pre-existing problems. And if that is how insurance worked, no one would have it until they needed it, but the amount they would charge you is simply the amount it was going to cost you anyways, so it would functionally be the same as just paying for what you owe when you happen to owe it and trying to avoid scenarios as much as possible that would lead to you owing anyone anything.
So when it comes to health insurance, there is a reason why carriers were not able, prior to Obama-care, to cover certain pre-existing conditions. The products they were selling and the industry they did commerce in wasn't made to pay for known issues, but to accept the risk of potential issues.
Forcing health insurance carriers to accept pre-existing conditions is like forcing Las Vegas to accept bets on games that have already been played. That isn't how betting works and you can't claim that it's not fair after the fact. It is fair. To let you bet on an outcome that has already happened would be unfair to those who bet on it before, not to mention unfair to the one accepting your bet.
So, in order to make this work, insurance carriers have had to change their prices in order to stay in business. So you are allowed to $1,000 on your pre-existing condition and guess what? You win! Your prize? $700. In order to allow you to bet without risk, you must win a prize that is less than your bet. So you can call that winning if you like, but you can't call it making money. And you can't blame the insurance carrier. Someone has to pay for all the infrastructure required to receive your claim, your payment and mail back your winnings.
It's the same as exchanging currency in a foreign land. You aren't trading apples for apples. You are paying a fee to have the funds transferred into a different medium, so your $1,000 does not equal the same amount in the foreign currency, it is reduced by the fees involved in changing your money into the other kind.
So Obamacare has thus forced a situation where there is now a service fee for all your transactions since they are forced to accept them. But that requires a permanent tax or hike in prices because that money has to come from somewhere. But now you've institutionalized a way for someone to tax you more, which once obtained will never be relinquished. Whereas before you had control over how often you engaged in the process, now it is out of your hands, which means someone will certainly be taking more out of your hands.
So we've surrendered control and money in order to gain a sense of "winning" which by my math is... losing.
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