It's a good thing that Sally Marrari's oncologist's 1969 Porsche needed a lot of work.

Marrari and her husband owned a garage. They worked on the car. The doctor worked on Marrari.

The arrangement, the Los Angeles woman said, was more reliable than her insurance.

Marrari was featured in a Washington Post story about insurers who drop beneficiaries when they get sick. Insurers say some enrollees fraudulently hide pre-existing conditions. Patients who are dropped think the insurers are looking for excuses to refuse to pay their bills when they're sick. Not paying for cancer treatment, for instance, because of some minor unrelated ailment or condition years earlier.

 "They said I never mentioned I had a back problem," said Marrari, 52, whose coverage with Blue Cross was abruptly canceled in 2006 after a thyroid disorder, fluid in the heart and lupus were diagnosed. That left the Los Angeles woman with $25,000 in medical bills and the stigma of the company's claim that she had committed fraud by not listing on a health questionnaire "preexisting conditions" Marrari said she did not know she had.

By the time she filed a lawsuit in 2008, she also got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and her debts had swelled beyond $200,000.

That's where the car repair deal came in.

This practice of rescinding individual health insurance policies is the subject of many state regulatory actions and lawsuits. (In 2008, the problem received particular attention in California when the five biggest insurers agreed to retroactively re-enroll thousands of plan members and pay millions of dollars in fines.) Under every health reform proposal being considered in Congress, rescissions would be outlawed. Insurers would have to insure regardless of preexisting conditions -- and keep insuring when people got sick. So expect President Obama to make this part of his "peace of mind" message Wednesday night. When Americans want to know "what's in it for me," one answer is "insurance that insures you."