The latest Affordable Care Act sabotage attempt from the occupier of the Oval Office takes direct aim at the protections we currently have against being prevented from getting health insurance because of our health status. Specifically, anyone with a pre-existing condition—ranging from asthma to pregnancy to acne to dodgy knees to cancer—cannot be refused coverage or have coverage priced so high it's not obtainable. That's the law, and has been since Obamacare was enacted. That's the law for everyone, not just people getting their insurance in the individual market or specifically through the Obamacare exchanges. Everyone.
“Anyone who just thinks this is just impacting the 12 to 15 million individuals with individual coverage is wrong,” said Timothy Jost, an emeritus law professor at Washington and Lee University. […]
“The implications aren’t nearly as big as for the individual market, but they’re real,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Some of these additional protections offered under the ACA were meaningful.”
In supporting the specious challenge from Texas and 19 other conservative states, the Trump administration is telling the 27 percent of Americans who have some sort of pre-existing condition that we should go back to the bad old days when they could be denied coverage. The states, and the Trump administration, claim that because Congress repealed one part of the law—the penalty on people who don’t get insurance—the rest of the health law is not valid.
The states and Trump are arguing that some parts of the law linked to the insurance-coverage mandate should be tossed—the provisions that make access to health insurance universal. If those provisions are struck down, then employers would again have the ability to lock people out of health care. They could require lengthy waiting periods for new hires to get insurance (now limited to 90 days) or could opt to not cover a new employee's cancer, for example, for up to a year. Small companies with a large number of older or sicker employees could face much higher insurance costs when purchasing coverage, costs they'd have to pass on to employees. About 13 million people work for and get their coverage from small employers.
Republicans keep insisting that they really don't want to go back to the bad old days, but everything they've done to fight the law for eight long years argues otherwise. It's taken eight years, but they finally seem to have clued in on the fact that they're the ones who are going to be blamed for it.
Let's pile on. Please give $1 to our Senate and House funds so that Republicans pay the price for sabotaging our health care.