This is what Republicans voted for

Here’s a quick reminder of what Republicans voted for yesterday, courtesy of NBC News:

“A young lawyer who died after a prolonged seizure. A young woman who died of cardiac arrest. Diabetes patients who cannot get insulin. Dr. Leana Wen said cases like these will happen again if the new version of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) passes Congress. All these patients had what the insurance industry calls pre-existing conditions — diseases, injuries or conditions that affected a patient before he or she got a health insurance policy.”

“‘Right now, the Affordable Care Act protects those with pre-existing conditions,’ said Wen, who was an emergency room physician before she became Baltimore city health commissioner. That would change under the AHCA. ‘States could allow insurers to set much higher rates for patients who have a pre-existing condition. That's terrifying, because patients could in essence be priced out of coverage,’ Wen told NBC News.

“Pre-Obamacare, health insurers routinely refused to cover people for such conditions, or charged extremely high premiums, co-pays and deductibles.”

“…medical groups from the American Medical Association to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) say health insurers often made up their own definitions of pre-existing conditions. And they often denied coverage to people born with such conditions, or who developed them in childhood. ‘The bill ... allows insurers to go back to putting annual and lifetime limits on coverage, meaning that a premature baby on private insurance could exceed her lifetime limit on coverage before she even leaves the hospital, the American Academy of Pediatrics said.”

“There's another reason medical groups oppose the new AHCA. It would let states ask to redefine ‘essential benefits’ — the conditions that must be covered by plans…. Wen said one ER visit could bankrupt someone without this protection. ‘This is not about people paying a few dollars more a month,’ she said. ‘These are preventable deaths and I saw them every day in the ER.’”