The Romney Plan’s ‘Pre-Existing Condition’ Gotcha
Under the Romney plan if your insurance lapses (unemployment, jobs switch, school, aged out of parent’s plan, etc. ) then you can can be denied for pre-existing conditions. The older I get the more I realize that you can count on someone getting left out if it’s a GOP plan.
The idea of “continuous coverage” is pretty much what it sounds like: Under the scheme Saul laid out earlier, an individual who kept buying insurance month after month could not be turned away by an insurance company. The goal is to create an incentive for healthy people, who don’t think they really need coverage, to keep paying monthly premiums — ensuring that they would have access to health insurance if their health should take a turn for the worse.
Congress thought it was a good enough idea to make a whole law out of it. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act greatly limited the ability of group plans to exclude employees’ pre-existing conditions if they had continuous coverage prior to the new job.
That’s great for an individual who gets a new job. But continuous coverage isn’t so great for the individual who has spent sometime without insurance, perhaps because of difficult financial times. Continuous coverage won’t do much for you in that situation.
That’s different from the health-care law, which stipulates that in 2014, anyone can gain access to health coverage regardless of his or her prior insured status. If Romney wanted to keep that kind of protection against pre-existing insurance in place — but without an individual mandate — insurance premiums would likely increase, as the sick people who planned to use their coverage disproportionately signed up.