During an interview with the Dallas Morning News, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) endorsed Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health care proposal and suggested that Americans with pre-existing conditions could find coverage in the individual market:

Q. Do you support Senator McCain’s — and President Bush”s — proposal to move away from employer sponsored [health] insurance and not just have those tax credits focused — tax breaks — on big employers?

A. I do because, you know, one thing that I’ve been amazed at is how many people feel like they’re trapped in a job that they don’t like because they’re afraid to move to a new job and be excluded under a pre-existing conditions clause in their new employer’s health insurance policy.

Cornyn has it backwards. While the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) includes protections “that limit exclusions for preexisting conditions” for individuals in groups plans, the unregulated individual insurance market systematically excludes people with pre-existing conditions from coverage.

In fact, if individuals enroll in “their new employer’s health insurance policy,” when “first eligible” they would not be “subjected to the 12-month preexisting condition exclusions period”:

Under HIPAA, the only preexisting conditions that may be excluded under a preexisting condition exclusion are those for which medical advise, diagnosis, care or treatment was recommended or received within the 6-month period before your enrollment date… If you had a medical condition in the past, but have not received any medical advise, diagnosis, care or treatment within the 6 months prior to your enrollment date in the plan, your old condition is not a preexisting condition to which an exclusion can be applied.

Conversely, Americans with pre-existing conditions can rarely find coverage in the individual market. According to one Commonwealth study, nearly 90 percent of people seeking coverage in the individual market “never end up buying a plan, finding it either very difficult or impossible to find one that met their needs or is affordable.” Individuals with preexisting conditions are “denied coverage, have conditions excluded, or face much higher and often unaffordable premiums.”

Last month, Cornyn claimed that the Texas health care system — despite having the highest uninsured rate in the country — should serve as a model of reform. Thus if Cornyn sees a high number of uninsured as a marker of successful reform, then McCain’s plan — which would increase the number of uninsured Americans from 45.7 to 55 million by 2013 — is certainly his best option.

Despite Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) claim that Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) “will help me reform Washington,” Palin’s adherence to a rigid conservative ideology that treats health care like any other commodity will only drive-up health care costs.

While governor Palin led an effort to repeal Certificate of Need laws, (CON) — “a regulatory process that requires certain health care providers to obtain state approval before offering certain new or expanded service.” As the National Council of State Legislatures points out, “the basic assumption underlying CON regulation is that excess capacity (in the form of facility overbuilding) directly results in health care price inflation“:

When a hospital cannot fill its beds, fixed costs must be met through higher charges for the beds that are used. Bigger institutions have bigger costs, so CON supporters say it makes sense to limit facilities to building only enough capacity to meet actual needs.

Palin argued that CON programs have failed to “lower costs for the consumer“:

But after much consideration, we believe that the program has not accomplished what it set out ultimately to do more than 30 years ago — lower costs for the consumer. It is time to end Alaska’s program in its present form. Doing so will not only reduce the cost of health care, it will also improve the access to health care, allow more competition and improve quality of care for patients.

But as Joe Padula points out over at Managed Care Matters, Palin has “no clue what she’s talking about.” In fact, a study of the health care costs of the big three automakers concluded that “CON states have lower health care costs than non-CON states“:

Like many conservatives, Palin assumes that increasing the number of hospital beds will lower health care costs. But “health care is not like any other good or service.” Indeed, “competition in health care is very different from other types of products and services,” — “the more supply there is, the higher costs are.”