To protect health care, we need to reform it

James Surowiecki's short article about health care reform, "Status-Quo Anxiety," in the August 31 New Yorker ends with the statement, "...if we want to protect the status quo, we need to reform it." His reasons for saying this would be good for people to consider who are afraid of losing what they already have. For example:

...although people tend to feel that they own their health insurance, their entitlement is distinctly tenuous. Because it’s hard for individuals to get affordable health insurance, and most people are insured through work, keeping your insurance means keeping your job. But in today’s economy there’s obviously no guarantee that you can do that. On top of that, even if you have insurance there’s a small but meaningful chance that when you actually get sick you’ll find out that your insurance doesn’t cover what you thought it did (in the case of what’s called “rescission”). In other words, the endowment that insured people want to hold on to is much shakier than it appears. Changing the system so that individuals can get affordable health care, while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will actually make it more likely, not less, that people will get to preserve their current level of coverage.