Free Republic

Under ObamaCare, insurers have the option of charging smokers up to 50 percent more to cover the associated higher costs of providing them with health care — but the District of Columbia, along with several other states, have decided that any plans being sold within their exchange are prohibited from adding tobacco surcharges. That simply wouldn’t be fair, you see: On Monday, the D.C. exchange’s executive board voted to prevent insurers from charging higher premiums to smokers than to nonsmokers — meaning nonsmokers are likely to pay modestly higher rates than if smoking surcharges were permitted. The District joins three...

The Obama administration issued new rules Tuesday that require insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions — one of the most popular provisions of President Obama’s healthcare law. The Health and Human Services Department also began to implement other popular, but expensive, parts of the Affordable Care Act. Regulations released Tuesday will prohibit insurers from charging women a higher premium than men, and will require plans in every state to cover certain services.

<p>Do you remember the debates over the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare? Now that repeal of the law has become a major campaign issue, it may be helpful to remember why Congress passed it in the first place.</p> <p>Early in 2010, as the climactic votes neared, a parade of the legislation's defenders—from the House, Senate and Obama administration—appeared across the media. All had the same message: pre-existing conditions. They named the names of families "victimized" by companies that had refused to sell them insurance, had canceled their coverage or had refused to pay their medical bills.</p>

“No. 1,” declared Mitt Romney in Wednesday’s debate, “pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.” No, they aren’t — as Mr. Romney’s own advisers have conceded in the past, and did again after the debate.

Mitt Romney disclosed on Sunday that he would keep several important parts of Barack Obama's overhaul of the American health care system, altering earlier vows for a blanket repeal of the president's most significant legislative achievement. Romney suggest he would keep provision related to pre-existing conditions and young people. "I say we're going to replace Obamacare. And I'm replacing it with my own plan," Romney said. "And even in Massachusetts when I was governor, our plan there deals with pre-existing conditions and with young people."

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama often discussed his mother's struggle with cancer. Ann Dunham spent the months before her death in 1995, Obama said, fighting with insurance companies that sought to deny her the coverage she needed to pay for treatment. "I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn't thinking about how to get well, she wasn't thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence," Obama said in September...

House Republicans and members of the health insurance industry are dismissing as a gross overstatement an Obama administration study -- released as debate gets underway to repeal the health care law -- that says as many as half of all Americans under 65 have a pre-existing condition that could threaten their access to health insurance. The Department of Health and Human Services study, released Tuesday, concludes that somewhere between 50 million and 129 million non-elderly Americans have a pre-existing condition -- the kind of condition insurance companies can use to deny coverage. The study further found that 15-30 percent of...

Fact Sheet The Health Insurance Portability And Accountability Act (HIPAA) U.S. Department of Labor Employee Benefits Security Administration December 2004 The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) offers protections for millions of American workers that improve portability and continuity of health insurance coverage. HIPAA Protects Workers And Their Families By Limiting exclusions for preexisting medical conditions (known as preexisting conditions). Providing credit against maximum preexisting condition exclusion periods for prior health coverage and a process for providing certificates showing periods of prior coverage to a new group health plan or health insurance issuer. Providing new rights that allow individuals...

Complete title: Obama Administration Warns, ‘129 Million Americans With a Pre-Existing Condition Could Be Denied Coverage Without New Health Reform Law’ Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius speaks to reporters at HHS headquarters in Washington on July 1, 2010. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr) (CNSNews.com) – With a health care repeal vote scheduled for Wednesday in the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives, the Obama administration is warning Americans of dire consequences if the Democrats’ law is repealed, defunded or gutted. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius framed the Democrats’ argument in a news release on Monday.Sebelius pointed to a new analysis...

Offered as a correction to this morning’s Headline item. Initially, the Hill reported that Cantor wanted to retain ObamaCare’s framework for preexisting conditions. Not so, as they now note in a postscript to the article: He wants to repeal the whole thing, then replace it with a GOP bill that will have its own, different preexisting conditions provision — but no individual mandate.How that’s going to work in practice, I have no idea. Cantor stressed that while he supports full repeal of the current law, Republicans share some of the same goals as Democrats, although they propose different ways of...

Democrats think they know how to run the insurance industry better than the insurance industry, and they're getting the chance to prove it under ObamaCare. Consider the early returns on its plan to insure Americans denied coverage for pre-existing conditions. To judge by President Obama's rhetoric, the insurance industry's victims have been wandering the country like Okies in "The Grapes of Wrath." Thus ObamaCare gave the Health and Human Services Department the power to design and sell its own insurance policies. The $5 billion program started in July and runs through 2014, when ObamaCare's broader regulations kick in. Mr. Obama...

255 million: The number of Americans with existing health insurance coverage.20 million: The number of Americans without any health coverage at all due to economic circumstances.375,000: The number of Americans with pre-existing conditions HHS said would apply for coverage in the first year of ObamaCare, one of the main political arguments for its implementation.8,011: The number that actually did. To judge by President Obama’s rhetoric, the insurance industry’s victims have been wandering the country like Okies in “The Grapes of Wrath.” Thus ObamaCare gave the Health and Human Services Department the power to design and sell its own insurance policies....

To give you an idea of just one part of the chaos that the Dems have inflicted with the health control bill, here is a brief summary from a legal treatise of one small aspect of insurance law in California. As you will see, to force an insurer to provide coverage for a condition that pre-existed the beginning of the coverage, is to force the insurer to provide something that is not "insurance" as that term is presently defined in California, and probably in every other jurisdiction. Insurance is designed to protect against contingent or unknown risks of harm, not...

SEC. 1201. AMENDMENT TO THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE ACT. Part A of title XXVII of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 300gg et seq.), as amended by section 1001, is further amended— (1) by striking the heading for subpart 1 and inserting the following: ‘‘Subpart I—General Reform’’; (2)(A) in section 2701 (42 U.S.C. 300gg), by striking the section heading and subsection (a) and inserting the following: ‘‘SEC. 2704. PROHIBITION OF PREEXISTING CONDITION EXCLUSIONS OR OTHER DISCRIMINATION BASED ON HEALTH STATUS. ‘‘(a) IN GENERAL.—A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may...

The Democrats have been very fond of touting one particular "benefit" of their health care system takeover legislation. Namely, they claim that the mandate which prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage for preexisting conditions will be wildly popular with the American public. What exactly is a preexisting condition? Unless you happen to be in absolutely perfect health, you probably have a preexisting condition from the perspective of the health care system. If you are overweight, if you consume alcohol or use tobacco, if you wear corrective lenses, dentures, or a hearing aid, you have a preexisting condition. If you are...

President Obama and his Democratic machine has spent the last few months forcing their idea of health care reform through the legislative process. Two of the major selling points used again and again were coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and the guarantee that sick children would be covered almost immediately by the new law. Just two days after the president signed his monstrous health care overhaul into law, we find out he was not even telling the truth about that.

One of the things on most people's health care reform to-do list is fix the pre-existing condition problem. In real life, this problem is a lot smaller than it used to be. For the most part, so long as an individual has continuous health care coverage, he or she can change insurers and have any pre-existing conditions covered. The problem comes when the individual stops paying for health insurance and then develops a health problem. For obvious reasons, insurance companies aren't going to just start covering a person who is already sick or injured. That's like providing auto insurance after...

PROPONENTS of compul sory, government-designed health insurance can't seem to understand why others disagree. Perhaps the public is realizing that these proposals are fundamentally about redistributing health? Health-care "reform," that is, aims to shift costs and benefits of health insurance from some groups to others. And the losers are turning out to be less docile than politicians had hoped. All the leading proposals involve massive redistribution from people with healthy lifestyles to those who take more risks. As the Congressional Budget Office explained, "Premiums in the new insurance exchanges would tend to be higher than the average premiums in the...

Many people, in the face of a family with a seriously ill child or a parent with a chronic condition, are quick to insist that all private insurance contracts cover all preexisting conditions. To explain the morality of this knee-jerk emotion, one must understand how modern insurance works.