Pre-Existing Conditions

This Visualizing Health Policy infographic with JAMA spotlights public opinion on health reform in the United States as of 2017, including priorities and views of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) and its provisions.

For more than 35 years, many states operated high-risk pool programs to offer non-group health coverage to uninsurable residents. The federal government also operated a temporary high-risk pool program established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions in advance of when broader insurance market changes took effect in 2014. This issue brief reviews the history of these programs to provide context for some of the potential benefits and challenges of a high-risk pool.

This brief examines insurance practices from before the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) and highlights challenges in providing access and stable coverage for people, along with issues that any ACA replacement plan will need to address.

Larry Levitt’s January 2017 post explains the logistics of a “repeal and delay” approach to the Affordable Care Act, and outlines key elements of a proposed replacement plan from Rep. Tom Price, who is President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. The post is now available at The JAMA Forum.

Originally published in The Los Angeles Times, this perspective examines the potential implications for the individual market if key parts of the Affordable Care Act were repealed without a replacement plan.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis finds that 52 million adults under 65 – or 27 percent of that population — have pre-existing health conditions that would likely make them uninsurable if they applied for health coverage under medical underwriting practices that existed in most states before insurance regulation changes…

This brief reviews medical underwriting practices by private insurers in the individual health insurance market prior to 2014, and estimates how many American adults could face difficulty obtaining private individual market insurance because of a pre-existing condition if the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) were repealed or amended and such practices resumed.

In this Wall Street Journal Think Tank column, Drew Altman discusses new data highlighting why pre-exisitng conditions could be a flashpoint issue in the Affordable Care Act repeal and replace debate.

In this post for The JAMA Forum, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt discusses the concept of allowing insurers to sell health plans across state lines and how such a proposal could affect people with pre-existing conditions.

In this post for JAMA, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt outlines the health care platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties, noting their fundamentally different aims and differing ideas about, among other things, the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) and Medicare.