Fighting for better health insurance
Recently, we saw another in a long line of Republican attacks on the health care coverage of middle class Americans. Shockingly, this attack originated at the Department of Justice, which announced that it will stop defending the law in a number of lawsuits that would have the effect of ending current protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions. This is wrong, and I am determined to keep fighting to ensure that every American with a pre-existing condition is protected.
These protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions are a cornerstone of our healthcare system, which seeks to provide every American with quality, affordable health insurance. Prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), insurers could charge you more for being a woman, or for having a prior or ongoing medical condition, like asthma or cancer.
They could also simply refuse to cover you at all because of your medical history. This Administration wants to lift the federal ban on this type of health insurance discrimination. We must not go back to the dark days when this was allowed.
This is just the latest attack from the current Administration that has sabotaged our health care system, by cutting funding for the Navigators that provide assistance to individuals trying to pick a health plan, making it harder for people with major life changes to enroll or change their health insurance mid-year via a Special Enrollment Period, cutting the length of Open Enrollment each year, and canceling the cost-sharing reduction payments that help keep coverage affordable. Each instance of sabotage was designed to make it harder to enroll in coverage, make coverage more expensive, or make it easier for insurers to only cover healthy people.
Combined, these repeated efforts to sabotage and weaken the ACA have already had an impact by driving up premiums in Pennsylvania by 30 percent in 2018. Pennsylvania families are hurting as a result of these actions.
A mother from Martinsburg wrote to me last year, saying “The state of health insurance has become grim, particularly heading into 2018 — increased, high premiums, high deductibles, and paying more for less.” Yet the Republican attacks haven’t stopped.
Congressional Republicans are complicit in this scheme, having spent the better part of 2017 trying to repeal protections for pre-existing conditions and undermine the health insurance exchanges and plans designed to provide quality, affordable health insurance to working families. Yet they still say things like, “Everybody I know in the Senate — everybody — is in favor of maintaining coverage for pre-existing conditions.” Every proposal they put forth would have led to millions of Americans losing their health insurance. Their tax scheme made changes to the law that will drive up the cost of health insurance. Despite these actions, we were able to defeat the worst of their proposals that would have taken health insurance coverage from millions because of a huge groundswell of support from communities across the nation.
We need another wave of opposition to start. This attempt to remove pre-existing condition protections doesn’t just apply to the individual market — it could also affect the millions of Americans who get insurance from their employer, especially if they work for a small business. Without strong, united voices from every community standing up together and saying “NO!” we risk losing a key piece of the health care system that protects all of us.
I’m going to fight like hell against this and every other attempt to rip coverage away from Pennsylvania families. I’m going to keep fighting for better health insurance for all Pennsylvanians.
I will not cooperate with any effort that would harm individuals with pre-existing conditions or disabilities and prevent them from getting the health insurance they need to cover their care. I urge you to join me in this fight.
Originally published at www.dailyitem.com.
