To r21 and r24: forget that she's a celebrity. I think you're over estimating the value of her acting career and family legacy, given the personal history of her father and the work she's done, but that's not the point. Even if she could have afforded to keep her insurance and chose not to (something I doubt a cancer survivor would ever willingly do, but we don't know the facts here) I still don't think a person should pay for that mistake with her life or bankrupting her family.
Imagine this scenario as a regular person.
You have insurance. You get laid off. You opt for COBRA (an 18 month extension of your employer based benefits where you are entitled to keep the same policy but must pay the full premium yourself). Your individual policy that you used to pay a percentage premium of, for instance, $100 a month, now costs you $500 a month or more. You don't find a job and the COBRA ends after 18 months. Or you get part-time a job with no benefits. You're forced to buy your own private policy, where even the cheapest policy is hundreds of dollars a month - hard to afford on unemployment or a part-time salary. You begin depleting your savings, and after a while can't afford the policy. You are forced to make a financial choice: rent, food, utilities, student loan, health insurance premium. What to give up?
Or maybe you couldn't afford the COBRA at all. Or maybe you have a family policy; estimate double or triple the costs.
Or perhaps you're younger, and you take the calculated risk of letting your insurance lapse.
Now it's time to get a new policy. Maybe it's through a new employer, or you're now able to buy your own private policy. Under the current system (which is the set-up Romney-Ryan will keep in place if elected) in the majority of cases, an insurance can't subject you to a pre-existing condition clause, if you can prove you have "uninterrupted" prior coverage. In most cases this means you cannot have gone for more than 2 months without insurance coverage in the previous year. If you fail to meet this criteria, and your new employer's benefits aren't "cadillac" enough to waive all pre-existing condition clauses, you're out of luck. Under Romney-Ryan, tens of millions will still be denied coverage.
The basic question is: do we want a system where you end up with a catastrophic illness and are unable to get coverage because you lost your job, or chose rent over insurance, or, god forbid, took a risk at age 24 that you were healthy and wouldn't need coverage for a while, and then, whoops, you get Hodgkin's or leukemia?
There are lots of circumstances where a person ends up without insurance through no fault of their own. And, really, do we think that even the person who loses health insurance through a stupid risk-taking choice deserves to be denied medical treatment because of it? I know plenty of people (many in my own family) who say, "take responsibility, you chose to let it lapse." Personally, I find that inhumane, and much more of a death panel than anything Sarah Palin and the GOP dreamed up as part of ObamaCare.
Her celebrity status means nothing. Think of her as an under-employed contractor.
The ACA, if left intact, will eventually make pre-existing condition clauses disappear (although high premiums are going to be with us forever, I suspect). The "tax" people will pay if they elect not to buy coverage will mean that even if they don't get coverage and then suddenly find themselves with leukemia at age 25, they will still be able to buy coverage.
I get wanting people to make smart choices rather than bad ones that end up negatively impacting themselves, their family and indirectly, society as a whole. But I personally think we've got a broken system where you pay for an error in judgement with your life or the financial solvency of your family, when a better financial model for healthcare delivery would remove the incentive people have to opt out of coverage.
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