A lot of plans relied on that, which is what made them cheap, and customers would regularly get screwed by it, and Obamacare makes all that illegal now.
The downside for Obama is that if someone gets sick, and goes to the hospital and actually has their costs covered, they're not exactly going to be amazed that the plan works exactly as they would have expected. So in that sense, the law might never really get the appreciation it deserves.
Paternalism and consumer protections are two sides of the same coin. The fact is that without some protections, you could wind up signing your life away due to some sleazy fine print.
Dealing with insurance companies is asymmetric warfare. There's an entire industry built around maximizing the profits it makes on customers. The surest way to boost profits is to make people think they're buying more protection than they are. Charge more for less. That's one of the many reasons consumer protections exist.
Besides, while rescission was rare, annual maximums and lifetime maximums were not. Bumping up against those maximums (now illegal) was rare, but see above - they happened at the worst times, oftentimes to people who weren't expecting it.
Insurance against a condition that already exists is not insurance.
Preventive care should not be something you look to insurance to pay for. Do you expect to be insured against your weekly grocery shopping bill? Your utilities? Your rent?
You don't say why you were denied coverage for broken leg rehab and pneumonia treatment. It seems a stretch for it to have been denied as pre-existing condition, but one of the problems when insurance companies were allowed to deny for pre-existing conditions was that they did often make non-sensical stretches to deny. I think reason for denial in your case was probably for something else, perhaps something like an insurer's "annual cap" on coverage (but not that b/c your previous coverage was years earlier), another thing that now is gone thanks to Obamacare.
Needless to say, I'm looking forward to that provision of obamacare.
In fact, Obamacare mandates that much preventive care be provided for free. Health insurance is different from many kinds of insurance, which you hope never to collect on. With healthcare insurance you're very likely to use at least some covered services every year. Preventive care is the kind of care everyone should have every year, and it is the kind of care that best reduces health costs, making it best for patients and for nation as a whole. That's why Obamacare requires that it be covered 100%, even in least expensive bronze plans. This encourages people to get preventive care and prevents bigger expenses for them later on. I'm not knocking Obamacare. Hardly, I'm a proponent of it. It makes sense.
What sort of insurance are you thinking of that you do plan to collect on?
BZZZT.
As I understand it, study after study shows preventive case does not result in cost reductions. E.g. look at the controversial mammogram screening recommendations that came out a while ago. There are many other mechanisms where not immediately obvious things come into play.
That's not to say we shouldn't do it, look at the backlash to those mammogram recommendations, which would have killed a friend of mine in her early 40s if she and her doctor had followed them, just that they will overall cost more.
I do agree that unwise or poorly designed preventive care, usually in the form of excessive and expensive testing that is poorly chosen and often has too many false positives, is one of the big problems running up medical costs. That does not change the fact that proper preventive care is most cost-effective form of healthcare.
With that said, hard cases make bad law, and the argument against immediate coverage of pre-existing conditions — healthy people will rationally choose to remain un- or underinsured, then seek more comprehensive coverage when diagnosed with something that requires expensive treatment — is reasonable.
It's also a decent argument for universal health care at a reasonable minimum standard.
I don't know about Jayschwa, but __xtrimsky elsewhere in this discussion is one of the "young invincibles" who's buying of very expensive insurance is essential for the economics to work out; well, such as they were before 14 and counting last minute changes.