@sstainba,
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My boyfriend has asthma too. It wasn't his fault, but he still understands that it's a chronic illness that is his burden, not that of the tax payer.
Who said anything about the taxpayer? They pay premiums just like anyone else does for their health insurance.
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It sucks that your cousin has asthma, but the bottom line is that it costs more to treat her and so the insurance companies should be allowed to charge her more. It may not be her fault she has the disease, but it also is that of the insurance company. So if your argument is that your cousin shouldn't have to pay for something that isn't her fault, why should the insurance company have to pay for something that isn't their fault ?
It doesn't cost that much more to treat her, and the insurance companies are extremely profitable. The insurance company's reason for existing is to amortize the costs of health care over many different individuals, reducing the cost for each individual's care.
I for example cost my insurance company practically nothing. Almost all the money I give them (my employer, really) goes straight into profit for them. And there are a lot of people like me out there.
Therefore I find your argument to be unconvincing. Perhaps if the industry wasn't profiting in the billions of dollars every year, you might have a point about them not being able to soak up costs of more expensive clients. As things stand it doesn't really reflect reality. And it also doesn't reflect the reality of insurance companies in other countries; they certainly seem to cover everyone without much of a problem. Check out Germany if you want to see what I mean.
As an aside, for those who claim that the Senate HC bill will increase the deficit, the CBO has once again released a scoring which shows this to be untrue:
http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=488
Cycloptichorn
