Latest TrumpCare Bill Still Allows Discrimination Against People with Pre-Existing Conditions
We have some news for all of the Republican Senators who have expressed concern about Americans with pre-existing conditions: the latest TrumpCare bill won’t protect them. In fact, the bill would allow insurers to charge Americans with pre-existing conditions higher premiums or deny them coverage altogether. From yesterday afternoon’s VoxCare email newsletter:
“The new Republican plan to repeal Obamacare would bring preexisting conditions back to the individual market, allowing insurers to charge sick people higher premiums — or deny them coverage outright.”
“‘You can be charged more for a specific condition,’ says Chris Sloan, a senior manager at the health research firm Avalere, of the Cassidy-Graham plan that has begun to gain traction on Capitol Hill.”
“The new bill has been championed by its sponsors, Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), as giving states more flexibility in how they run their health care systems. One of those flexibilities includes a waiver system that would let states opt out of many key Obamacare regulations.”
“Those waivers do have some guardrails. The bill says states cannot tether an individual's premiums to ‘sex or membership in a protected class under the Constitution of the United States.’ Anything else — a cancer diagnosis, a history of breast cancer, a mild case of asthma — is fair game. In states that did pursue and receive these waivers, health plans would have full authority to charge sicker patients higher premiums to offset their costs.”
“…There is no definition in the bill of what counts as ‘affordable’ coverage. This would largely be left up to future bureaucrats in Washington to decide.”
“‘You could stretch the definition pretty broadly of what counts,’ says Sloan. ‘Maybe you fund a high-risk pool that only allows in some number of people, and that counts. It's a pretty wide space.’”
“What's more, that language does not outlaw discrimination against sick patients. An individual with a history of asthma, for example, could see health insurance plans that want to charge her 10 percent more because they expect she'll have higher health care costs.”