Stop if you heard this one before.  Stupid woman is shocked to learn there is no free ride – even from the government.

Ending insurance discrimination against the sick was a central goal of the nation’s health care overhaul, but leading patient groups say that promise is being undermined by new barriers from insurers.

First off, you cannot insure the sick. Insurance is a gamble. The customer buys a policy believing they will use more health services than they will pay in health insurance premiums. The other side of the insurance bet is the insurance company. They are betting they will charge you more than you cost them over the life of the policy. The insurance company is almost always right about that bet. Otherwise, they lose money and go out of business.

When you force them to insure people with known illnesses, they bake those known costs into the premium. If they cannot, then they find other ways to mitigate the costs, like not selling you a policy or jacking up the rates on the healthy. Like all gambling propositions, the losers pay the winners, while the house takes a piece.

The insurance industry responds that critics are confusing legitimate cost-control with bias. Some state regulators, however, say there’s reason to be concerned about policies that shift costs to patients and narrow their choices of hospitals and doctors.

With open enrollment for 2015 three months away, the Obama administration is being pressed to enforce the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination provisions. Some regulations have been issued; others are pending after more than four years.

More than 300 patient advocacy groups recently wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell to complain about some insurer tactics that “are highly discriminatory against patients with chronic health conditions and may … violate the (law’s) nondiscrimination provisions.”

Among the groups were the AIDS Institute, the American Lung Association, Easter Seals, the Epilepsy Foundation, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National Kidney Foundation and United Cerebral Palsy. All supported the law.

Coverage of expensive drugs tops their concerns.

Sure it is. People like free stuff. Men who spend their weekends in bathroom stalls with strange men, contracting an incurable disease, would love it if the rest of us had to pay for their treatments. People who engage in risky behavior are more expensive to insure than people who play it safe. In a sane world, the risky pay more while the prudent pay less, but that’s not America. At the end of the piece we have this gem.

“People who have high cost health conditions are still having a problem accessing care,” said law professor Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee University in Virginia. “We are in the early stages of trying to figure out what the problems are, and to what extent they are based on insurance company discrimination, or inherent in the structure of the program.”

No, they have plenty of access to care. They are having trouble getting someone else to pay for it.  When you believe you can defy the laws of nature, deny the realities of the physical world and force everyone to pretend your fantasies are reality, you are a probably insane. Many of these people are insane or just stupid, but many are liars, who make money getting us to pretend that fantasy is real.

Many of these people truly believe their is an unlimited, inexhaustible supply of health care in the world. The only reason everyone is not dipping their cup into the well of health care is the mean old health insurance companies are guarding it. Like the hero who slays the dragon, these people imagine themselves slaying the reality of health care so everyone gets free medicine.