How Obamacare has hurt, not helped, Americans with preexisting conditions

Published in Blog on January 16, 2020 by Convention Of States

When Congress passed Obamacare in 2010, proponents promised the new law would insure the uninsured and help those patients with preexisting conditions. But while the government-run healthcare exchange has brought more Americans into the insurance marketplace, it hasn't delivered on its promise to provide quality care for all.
As the Daily Signal reports, one-size-fits-all Obamacare regulations have restricted access to hospitals and doctors, increased premiums and prescription costs, limited who patients can see for primary care, and kept patients from getting the cancer treatment they need.
For example,

Many of the country’s top hospitals today are off limits to patients covered by Obamacare’s current plans. Take Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center, which was named America’s best cancer-care hospital by U.S. News & World Report in 13 of the past 16 years.

The hospital’s website suggests that it takes even garden-variety Medicaid, but it doesn’t accept a single private health insurance plan sold on the individual market in Texas.

Since Blue Cross of Minnesota withdrew from the individual market in 2016, the state’s Mayo Clinic—once cited by President Barack Obama as a model for the nation—has been off limits to many Minnesotans covered by Obamacare exchange plans.

For instance, most of the 170,000 people with Obamacare who live in the Twin Cities do not have access to the Mayo Clinic. Likewise, Memorial Sloan Kettering appears out of bounds for every exchange plan in New York. Both of these hospitals are open to some Medicaid patients, although Mayo’s chief executive predicted publicly that Medicaid patients may eventually have to queue behind their privately insured peers.

Why has this happened? Simple. Top-down regulations from bureaucrats in D.C. who have no idea how to manage the healthcare for patients nationwide.

So having attracted higher-cost enrollees, Obamacare then failed to handle their risk adequately. The statute provided for states to create risk adjustment programs to transfer funds from plans with healthier enrollees to plans with sicker ones.

Yet rather than deferring to states, which have long experience regulating insurance, the Obama administration put in place a federal one-size-fits-all risk adjustment program where risk was poorly assessed.

The results? It drove some insurers bankrupt and other insurers with small market shares out of the market altogether. And some insurers passed along the cost to certain patients through higher out-of-pocket charges, according to a 2016 study by Harvard and University of Texas economists.

Given the disaster of Obamacare, it defies logic and common sense to propose a nationalized healthcare system. But that's exactly what many politicians are proposing. In an effort to gain more control over the daily lives of the American people, these federal politicians are hoping to bring even more of the healthcare system under Washington's power.
We can't let that happen, and it won't happen if we call the first-ever Article V Convention of States.
A Convention of States has the power to propose constitutional amendments that limit the jurisdiction of the federal government. These amendments can expressly prohibit Washington from legislating on any issue not mentioned in the Constitution. Such an amendment would get the feds out of everything from education to the environment to healthcare, and leave those decisions with state and local governments -- where they belong.