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.