Stora tråden om amerikansk inrikespolitik

An amendment in the GOP health-care-reform bill will allow states to deny coverage for preexisting conditions, including sexual assault.
Pre-Obamacare rape survivors who sought treatment for their injuries could be denied health care later on. Under Obamacare, preexisting conditions were guaranteed to receive coverage — among them, sexual assault. The American Health Care Act is going to change that.
Don't forgot this bill basically decriminalizes rape by making rape a pre-existing condition so if you report it, you can lose access to healthcare.

Far less attention has been paid to the effect on people with employer-sponsored insurance.

Trump pledged not to cut Medicaid. Is he keeping that promise?
If even a few states let insurers offer inexpensive plans that cover only bare-bones benefits, large nationwide employers could set up their coverage along those lines. Such plans would come with lower premiums, but could leave people with huge gaps in their coverage, according to Matthew Fiedler, a health policy analyst at the Brookings Institution who wrote a recent article about the change.

What’s more, other Affordable Care Act protections — notably, the cap on how much patients spend out of pocket each year — are tied to essential benefits. The ban on insurers imposing lifetime limits on coverage is also tied to essential benefits.

If states let insurers pare those benefits way back, those protections are essentially toothless. People on a plan that doesn’t cover hospitalization, for instance, will have no cap at all on their out-of-pocket costs for hospital bills.

Fiedler said that could leave many Americans vulnerable to catastrophic bills in a health crisis.

“At a bare minimum, I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of coverage categories get carved out,” Fiedler said. “You really only need one state with no essential benefit standards for large employers nationwide” to begin deploying much skimpier plans.