I had cancer in 1998, and my wife has some pre-existing conditions, but Washington has a strict questionnaire-based insurance approval process that an insurance commissioner managed to get put into place over a decade ago for individual policies.

You fill out this questionnaire, and are scored, and based on the score, the insurer must cover you or may decline. There is no skeezy, “well, you’re taking sleeping pills” nonsense. That’s got a score attached. Even with our health history, we have no chronic problems and are generally well, and thus were covered.

Washington doesn’t allow pre-existing conditions to be excluded except in the case of moving from a less-expensive (less-inclusive) to more-expensive (more comprehensive) health plan, and even then most exclusions end after 6 months. (You can’t, in other words, get better coverage when you know you have major health issues coming up in the next few months.)

(There’s also the federal laws that disallow pre-existing condition exclusions if you have continuous individual or group coverage before getting a new policy. I’m not sure why your wife’s policy would have been written to exclude head issues; I’m not sure that’s legal.)

Sometimes melancholy makes me buy a Sunday newspaper – that’ll end with the iPad.

But still, each second Saturday I eagerly wait for my new c’t magazin (www.heise.de/ct) from Heise. No app for that – yet.

Look at many of the publications out there now that basically send out information unedited directly from sources without context or checking. It’s minimal filtering at best — but with a veneer of objectivity and filtering because if readers don’t know how the sausage is made, they may assume that all the normal reporting functions are going on — despite the fact that many reporters are far too overburdened in this environment to do the same depth of reporting they did five to ten years ago.

Also — let’s face it, some filtering is not good. Some people report with major bias that *isn’t* disclosed and that doesn’t serve the audience well either. At least when getting straight from the horse’s mouth you can make the connection.