During our conversation, we discover how the ACA helps people living with Gaucher disease and other chronic illnesses—and what we stand to lose if the ACA is repealed. For more information about healthcare legislation, NGF explains what is healthcare legislation? The Affordable Care Act addresses several key issues, including health insurance coverage, preventative care, coverage for preexisting conditions, and healthcare costs. At its heart, the idea behind the ACA is to expand health insurance coverage using public options at both the federal and state levels.
Several key components to the ACA mean millions more Americans receive health insurance coverage and access to the healthcare services they need. First, the ACA names 10 essential health benefits insurance plans must cover:.
At first, the possibility of increased insurance premiums concerned many Americans. And while there were growing pains at first, costs for many people are now holding steady or even dropping. It took a while for people to start accepting such a big policy change, and for insurance companies to start making money, but the benefits consumers began to see, swayed public opinion in favor of the law. In summer , the last feasible congressional attempt to repeal the Act was defeated.
Since then, there have been several attempts to erode the ACA through less straightforward methods. If there are no penalties, healthy people have no incentive to buy insurance, and those with high healthcare costs end up in a giant high risk pool, which is exactly what the ACA aimed to avoid. Judges upheld the constitutionality of the ACA both times. But now, a new effort to strike down the act is making its way through our legal system.
Two Republican Governors and 18 Republican state attorneys general, led by Texas, initiated the lawsuit. The lawsuit, Texas v. In December , a Texas district court judge agreed with the plaintiffs.
Therefore, the entire ACA was unconstitutional and repealing it was appropriate. The judge is allowing the status quo to remain until all the appeals have been heard. In efforts to combat the ruling, and since the current administration is refusing to defend the law in court, 21 Democratic state attorneys general and the U. House of Representatives filed an appeal to challenge the ruling. Additionally, another suit has been filed questioning whether the Democratic challengers to the original lawsuit have standing whether the states will suffer harm to appeal.
If efforts to strike down the Affordable Care Act are successful, the American people will feel the impact quickly and the cost of repealing the affordable care act will be high. But the consequences could reach even further.
Insurance companies could go back to denying or delaying coverage to people living with chronic illnesses like Gaucher disease or even preexisting conditions as common as high blood pressure.
Since protections for people with preexisting conditions would be eliminated, people with Gaucher disease might be placed in high risk insurance pools. This would force people with expensive chronic illnesses like Gaucher disease to pay extremely high premiums for insurance coverage. If payment caps were lifted, there would be no end to the money patients would have to pay for their healthcare.
Nearly 30 percent of workers of color have a condition putting them at risk of a severe illness from COVID, and these same communities are less able to withstand unexpected costs resulting from job loss or medical costs. In addition, Black, Latinx, and Native people are at least 2. The same factors that drive health disparities for Black, Latinx, and Native communities also leave them disproportionately vulnerable to discrimination by insurance companies if ACA protections are taken away.
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly 14 percent of African Americans, 10 percent of Hispanics, and more than 17 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives reported having fair or poor health, compared with 8. These preexisting conditions would already be used against Black, Latinx, and Native people by insurers to raise rates, and now the disproportionate rate at which these communities contract and have complications from the coronavirus would further subject them to price hikes and denial of coverage.
Without the ACA, insurance companies would be allowed to charge women more just for being women—a practice common before the ACA. Alarmingly, such a trend would coincide with an economic crisis that has disproportionately driven women out of the workforce. Also, nearly 68 million women have a condition that could be deemed a preexisting condition, and even the nearly 6 million annual pregnancies would likely once again be considered a preexisting condition. Moreover, the elimination of other consumer protections, such as EHBs and the coverage of certain preventive care with no cost-sharing, could force millions of women to once again pay out of pocket for everything from mammograms to contraception to annual checkup appointments.
While data on how COVID has spread through schools that are reopened for in-person instruction are subject to uneven reporting , one independent analysis reports that there are more than 24, verified cases tied to K schools. Of the 20 million newly uninsured Americans, millions are parents who would not only have to worry about health risks to their loved ones but also unknown or unaffordable medical costs.
If families become uninsured and need intensive care or treatment, they could be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars, leading to medical debt or even bankruptcy. If the ACA is repealed, millions of Americans would pay more for their prescription drugs, including for lifesaving drugs that treat COVID and conditions that place people at higher risk of the virus.
Before the ACA closed the coverage gap, about 5 million Medicare enrollees fell into it. With nearly 9 in 10 older adults taking prescription drug medication—and 1 in 4 seniors already struggling to afford their medications—reopening the coverage gap would have devastating consequences. Before the ACA, individual market plans were not required to cover prescription drugs. Without the ACA, insurers could exclude all drugs or entire classes of drugs, leaving some patients with high out-of-pocket costs and others unable to afford the treatments they need during the current public health crisis.
Medicaid expansion narrowed racial gaps in coverage —which is particularly important as the pandemic continues to hit communities of color most harshly—and is critical for both preventive and curative care. States such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia, California, and Louisiana continue to battle the pandemic, each with hundreds of thousands enrolled in Medicaid expansion.
The sudden elimination would be catastrophic for public health, likely preventing millions of newly uninsured people from accessing treatment, threatening their own well-being and compounding the spread of the virus.
Furthermore, low-income families currently benefiting from Medicaid expansion would be at grave risk of financial catastrophe and more likely to take out debt in the event of a health emergency if they were to lose their coverage. Due to systemic racism, sexism, and poverty, Black women and Latinas disproportionately rely upon the benefits the Medicaid program provides, including covering nearly half of all births in the United States.
Eliminating this safety net is particularly concerning given Black women were already facing a maternal health crisis before the COVID pandemic devastated their community. Additionally, ACA repeal would reverse the gains from Medicaid expansion on the employment of people with disabilities—which is typically abysmally low—and would harm a community that is already disproportionately poor. Finally, research shows that Medicaid expansion has also enhanced public safety by helping low-income working-age adults transition from incarceration, saving communities tens of billions of dollars.
Stripping coverage from more than 20 million Americans at any point in time would be terribly cruel, but to do so during a deadly pandemic would be catastrophic on individual, community, and national levels.
During this economic crisis and public health emergency, the president should be following the guidance of public health experts and trying to increase access to affordable health care. The Trump administration should use the energy and speed they are applying to this callous endeavor to slow the spread of the coronavirus and help all Americans gain health care coverage to protect them during this unprecedented time.
Fewer dollars spent at grocery stores and other businesses means 1. Map is colored to illustrate relative impact by showing job loss as a share of total state employment. Share Tweet. How many people would lose their health insurance if the ACA were repealed? How many jobs would be lost if the ACA were repealed?
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