If you've only followed coverage from the Republican health care bill loosely in the media, you might believe that House Republicans, after much effort, passed legislation to deny people with pre-existing conditions medical health insurance.
The issue of pre-existing conditions has dominated the debate over the GOP health care bill out of all proportion towards the relatively modest provision in the legislation, that is being distorted – often willfully, sometimes ignorantly – right into a threat to any or all that's good and true in America.
The perversity of it all would be that the legislation is correctly understood as doing more to preserve the ObamaCare regulation on pre-existing conditions rather than undermine it. The legislation maintains a federal baseline of protection in such instances, and says that states can use for a waiver from this, provided that they abide by certain conditions meant to make sure that no one is left out in the cold.
Since these provisions only involve the person insurance market, a little slice of the overall insurance picture (about 18 million take presctiption the individual market), and simply make possible state waivers, they're inherently limited.
You're not affected if you get insurance through your employer (155 million people), or through Medicaid or Medicare. You aren't affected if you live in a state that does not request the waiver, a category that will certainly include every blue state and many red states, too. Even if you buy insurance on the individual market and live in a state that gets a waiver, you aren't affected if you've maintained insurance policy continuously and never were built with a gap in coverage more than 63 days.
By this time, we're talking about a part of a fraction of the fraction of people. If you have a pre-existing symptom in a waiver state and haven't had continuous coverage, you may be charged more from your insurer just the first year. Their state may have use of $8 billion in federal funds explicitly to alleviate the price of your insurance, and the state must further possess a high-risk pool or similar program to mitigate insurance costs for that sick.
Clearly, if Republicans set out to recklessly endanger the well-being of people with pre-existing conditions, they didn't perform a excellent job of it. The purpose of these provisions isn't to punish people who are sick, but to produce a motivation for people to purchase insurance while they're healthy. (The ObamaCare exchanges are failing because the law's tangle of regulations drove up costs making insurance economically unappealing towards the young and healthy.)
It takes all of five minutes to know the basic architecture of the House bill on pre-existing conditions, yet it has been subject to wildly ill-informed and deceptive attacks. Nancy Pelosi called the provisions on pre-existing conditions “deadly.” Rep. Frank Pallone of recent Jersey said the bill would hurt 129 million people with pre-existing conditions, starting from an exaggerated figure after which assuming every single one of them would be harmed through the House bill.
Such may be the hysteria around this issue that while using phrase “pre-existing condition” has become a license for making any charge whatsoever. Feminists have spread word that the bill treats rape as a pre-existing condition, a stupid lie that's been treated seriously in cable television debate. As The Washington Post Fact Checker noted, besides the balance not classify rape or sexual assault like a pre-existing condition, almost all states have their own protections for victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
There are certainly legitimate criticisms to make of the home bill, and ample room for the Senate to enhance it, especially by boosting its coverage numbers. But it's not an act of heedless cruelty against the sick. As for its critics, their reflex to demagogic dishonesty is not a pre-existing condition, just an ingrained habit.
