But my daughter Cat did not:

WASHINGTON —The health insurance industry said Tuesday that it was willing to end the practice of charging higher premiums to sick people if Congress adopted a comprehensive plan that provided coverage to all Americans.

. . .

In effect, insurers said they were willing to discard an element of their longstanding business model, under which insurance policies are priced, in part, on the basis of a person’s medical condition or history.

In the past, insurers have warned that if they could not consider a person’s health in setting premiums, the rates charged to young, healthy people would soar, making coverage unaffordable.

But Karen M. Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a major trade group, told lawmakers on Tuesday that insurers were exploring ideas to prevent such increases by spreading the risks and costs across a larger population of both healthy and unhealthy people.

Insurers said that they could accept more aggressive regulation of not just their premiums but also their benefits, underwriting practices and other activities. Such strict regulation, they said, would make a new public program unnecessary.

The practice is called community rating. Everybody pays the average health care costs for the community - i. e. the nation - healthy young people pay more than they get but then, when they get sick and old they pay less than they get. Men get to pick up the tab for women bearing children and everyone gets health insurance all of the time.

Of course this will only work if we have mandatory health insurance. Some people will try to game the system and not pay until they get sick.

It will also require either serious regulation or a competing government plan or both. Wonks Anonymous notes that health insurers are expert in designing policies that are unattractive to sick people, as he discussed here.

But hey, as Cat notes, somebody is just a little bit scared.