[Happy Monkey]

It's an issue if you're doing things piecemeal. Eliminating preexisting conditions has to be paired with universal (or very close) coverage.

Of course, if you're requiring people to buy insurance, you need to subsidize it for people who can't. And you need to lower the cost, to minimize the nuimber of people who need to be subsidized. If you don't have funding for subsidies and something the CBO predicts will lower costs, the bill is going nowhere. And getting an industry that is exempt from antitrust regulation to lower their prices isn't easy.

There may be some parts of this bill that could be done piecemeal, but not much of the meat of it.