The Center for American Progress’s Ben Furnas responded to my post about the political Left’s misunderstanding of health insurance markets by … showcasing the political Left’s misunderstanding of health insurance markets.

I claimed that the individual market provides insurance reliably to lots of very sick people — protection better than or equal to that provided by job-based health insurance. Furnas responds:

The main reason (not mentioned by Cannon) that some people who develop health problems can renew their health insurance without seeing higher premiums is federal regulation through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). States have improved on these regulations, offering more protections to sick consumers of private health insurance, but John McCain, in his push for an unregulated national market, would undermine these additional protections.

Actually, 75 percent of policies sold in the individual health insurance market provided those protections before government required them.

Furnas has more to say about the dangers of freedom and the need for more government control of people’s health care decisions, but that suffices to make the point.