I’ve been watching the health care summit on C-SPAN and I followed the live blogging on Cato’s site done by Arnold Kling and others.

I could comment on many things but I’ll choose three:

1. Obama, at about the 12:48 EST point, confused the idea of insurance pooling. He said that the purpose of insurance pooling is to put low-risk and high-risk people together. It’s not. The purpose is to pool like risks. This leads to point #2.

2. The Republicans have not handled THE tough problem. By agreeing that insurance companies should not be able to price based on pre-existing conditions, they have backed themselves into a regulatory corner. Although Obama tends to be dismissive of Joe Biden, and he did it again at about the 12:50 point, Biden nailed it. If we agree, he said, that insurance companies shouldn’t be allowed to “discriminate” based on pre-existing conditions, that’s not a small agreement, that’s a big one.

3. My pet peeve: How come Obama gets to comment on everything?