Another ObamaCare Lie: Protecting Those With Pre-Existing Conditions

Another ObamaCare Lie: Protecting Those With Pre-Existing Conditions
Source
By BETSY MCCAUGHEY
The Affordable Care Act gets curioser and curioser. President Obama promised to protect people with pre-existing conditions and help the uninsured.
Yet these vulnerable groups are getting clobbered. Congress needs to act to protect them and not wait until the entire misadventure plays out.
The people most threatened by ObamaCare have pre-existing conditions, meaning health problems that make it hard to get insurance. To sell ObamaCare, the president actually lied, claiming he would protect these people.
He even lied that his mother, Anne Dunham, a cancer victim, suffered because her insurer used the pre-existing condition excuse to drop her. The truth, revealed in a 2011 biography, is she had employer-provided insurance which paid her hospital bills until the end of her life.
Since 1996, employer-provided plans have been barred from dropping or excluding anyone based on a pre-existing condition. Nor does Medicare or Medicaid.
The pre-existing conditions problem affects about 2 million people in the individual market. The best options for these sick people are being closed because of ObamaCare.
In 35 states, they currently get coverage through high-risk pools, where premiums are subsidized to help keep them within reach. Most of these pools have long waiting lists.
But high-risk pools must close on Dec. 31, 2013, or shortly after, because the Affordable Care Act directs ill patients to enroll in ObamaCare exchange plans.
The problem is, most exchange plans severely limit their choice of hospitals and doctors, excluding academic hospitals and specialty cancer centers. State insurance commissioners are scrambling to delay closing the high-risk pools.
The high-risk pools are an honest way to subsidize care for the sick, and they’ve worked for twenty-five years. ObamaCare replaces them with a devious method — luring young, healthy people into exchange plans at premiums far higher than their own cost of care to offset the cost of the sick in the same pool. Exchange plans are a rip-off for the young and a dangerous downgrade for the sick.
The uninsured — the group the president claimed his law was enacted to help — also are left out in the cold. According to the Congressional Budget Office and the American Enterprise Institute, at least half of those who lose coverage gain it again within 12 months, generally because of a new job.
Continue reading, just CLICK HERE.

Wild Thing’s comment……………
Betsy is always so good at explaining about Obamacare.