Promises Broken: House GOP Plan Doesn't Bar Discrimination For Pre-Existing Conditions

Despite commitments to the contrary, GOP Leader John Boehner told reporters yesterday the House Republicans' health care bill will not prevent insurance providers from barring clients based on pre-existing conditions.  

In June, Roy Blunt's #1 principle for Republicans' "commonsense reforms" was to make affordable coverage available to everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions. He wrote:

The House Republican Health Care Solutions Group has been working for months on a plan... This process has resulted in the broad outline of a health care reform plan that the solutions group hopes will receive bipartisan support. The health care reforms outlined are designed to:

1. Make quality health care coverage affordable and accessible for every American, regardless of pre-existing health conditions.

Boehner has echoed this commitment. In September, he told NPR that "making sure that people who have preexisting conditions have access to affordable health insurance" is "essential." 

Now, however, their only solution is high-risk pools -- hardly an "affordable and accessible" option. From ThinkProgress:

Roll Call points out, however, that “most states have such pools, but they often are much more expensive than regular insurance and have had only limited success in reducing the ranks of the uninsured.” President Obama and the Senate Finance Committee have also embraced increased funding for high risk pools, but only as a stop gap until 2013, when insurers would be prohibited from denying people coverage based on preexisting conditions under their legislation.

Igor Volsky has more:

Nationwide, high-risk pools cover fewer than 200,000 people. Often, enrollees face high premiums and are denied benefits for treatments related to their preexisting conditions— the very thing the plan will help. Because these pools will be full of only sick people, covering all high-risk Americans through these pools is likely to be prohibitively expensive. According to the Tax Policy Center, using high-risk pools "to prevent large losses in insurance coverage among the sick and needy could …[cost] on the order of $1 trillion over ten years given projected health care pay-costs."

After months of guarantees and grandstanding, the GOP leadership's plan doesn't even address what Blunt said was their top priority. Nice. 

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/republicanconference/ / CC BY-NC 2.0