There was an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times written by one Ms. Ward, a woman with breast cancer. I’ll quote some of it here:

I found out 3 weeks ago I have cancer. I’m 49 years old, have been married for almost 20 years, and have two kids. My husband has his own small computer business, and I run a small nonprofit. With the recession, both of our businesses took a huge hit. The time finally came when we had to make a choice between paying our mortgage or paying for health insurance. We chose to keep our house. We made a nerve-racking gamble, and we lost.

If you still have a good job with insurance, that doesn’t mean that you’re better than me, more deserving than me, or smarter than me. It just means that you are luckier. And access to health care shouldn’t depend on luck.

Fortunately for me, I’ve been saved by the federal government’s Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan, something I had never heard of before needing it. It’s part of President Obama’s health care plan, one of the things that has already kicked in, and it guarantees access to insurance for U.S. citizens with pre-existing conditions who have been uninsured for at least 6 months. For me it’s been a lifesaver – perhaps literally.

So much of the battle over ObamaCare has focused on the Greatest Threat to Liberty Since Slavery, the individual mandate. It’s utter, cynical, opportunistic bullsh**, of course, since for years and years the mandate was the conservative counterproposal to further-reaching liberal plans. But after the PPACA passed, it was the only legal line of attack conservatives could find, and so here we sit, wondering what the most powerful man in America, Justice Anthony Kennedy, will do.

Will he strike down the entire law? Will he sever the mandate and leave the rest of the law? I have no clue. But whenever this comes up in the media or in discussion, the flash point, the focus of the debate is the evil or awesome individual mandate.

What gets forgotten, though, is how much more is in the law than the mandate. While most of the attention … went to the plight of the uninsured and the near-universality of the coverage, much more of the law was devoted to root-and-stem health insurance reform. Without the high-risk pool the PPACA established, [Ms. Ward] would be without any relief.

Why does this matter? Because people like Ms. Ward are in the individual market, and insurers individually underwrite each applicant – and refuse those who are bad risks. Come 2014 … they cannot refuse any applicant. And they may no longer charge different premiums for patients with varying health histories.

This is, it must be understood, how large insurers currently work. If you go work for Boeing, they don’t ask you before you are hired whether your wife has breast cancer. All employees get charged the same, and the premiums for the entire pool adjust to cover the aggregate cost. All the PPACA does here is bring the same rules that the group market already works under to the individual market.

This really will make the difference in the lives of so many Americans. And there is so much more. The requirement that insurers must spend 80% of premiums on actual health care. The prohibition on insurance “takebacks,” or recissions. The expansion of coverage for kids. The requirement that premium increases must be reasonable and justified. Increased funding for primary care and community health clinics. And on and on.

So the next time you are inclined to go off on a spittle-flecked rant over the individual mandate (and I’ve emitted a few of my own), just pause and take a moment to remember that there is a lot more in this law. Regardless of the fate of the mandate, we should all be hoping that Justice Kennedy lets the rest of the law stand

This recurring feature will present posts by various EM bloggers. Read the original post at allbleedingstops.blogspot.com/2011/12/beyond-mandate-obamacare-matters.html. Reprinted with permission.