The Trump administration's dangerous decision to refuse to defend the Affordable Care Act against a spurious suit from Republican states means that the administration is actually arguing that it's unconstitutional to stop insurance companies from denying or dropping coverage for people with pre-existing conditions like cancer, asthma, or diabetes. That is tantamount to telling the roughly 130 million Americans who have pre-existing conditions and also have health insurance because of the law to go pound sand.
About half of nonelderly Americans have one or more pre-existing health conditions, according to a recent brief by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, that examined the prevalence of conditions that would have resulted in higher rates, condition exclusions, or coverage denials before the ACA. Approximately 130 million nonelderly people have pre-existing conditions nationwide, and, as shown in the table available below, there is an average of more than 300,000 per congressional district. Nationally, the most common pre-existing conditions were high blood pressure (44 million people), behavioral health disorders (45 million people), high cholesterol (44 million people), asthma and chronic lung disease (34 million people), and osteoarthritis and other joint disorders (34 million people).
If the states—and Trump—are to prevail here, it means private insurance wouldn't have to guarantee coverage to those 130 million people any more. Remember all the times Republicans and Trump said they'd come up with an Obamacare replacement plan that would keep those protections? They lied. They don't care about your pre-existing condition.
To be clear, the courts haven't yet been so polluted with Trump appointees that he'll prevail here. The argument the states—and Trump—is relying on is "silly." But what this is doing is heaping even more uncertainty into an already shaky individual insurance market. Insurers are right now setting premiums for next year, and in some cases hiking them as much as 30 percent. This attack from the Trump administration only adds to that. And will probably mean further rate hikes. "Any time there’s uncertainty about the future, insurers are going to build extra cushion into their premiums to make sure they get revenues while they can," Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Vox's Dylan Scott.
Those rate hikes are going to be announced this fall. Before the election. With a voting population that consistently and strongly keeps health care at the top of the list of concerns for the 2018 midterms, that should be concerning some Republicans. And motivating Democrats.
Please give $1 to our Senate and House funds so that Republicans pay the price for sabotaging our health care.