IN WEST VIRGINIA, 1 IN 3 UNDER 65 HAVE PRE-EXISTING MEDICAL ISSUE
pre-existing conditions losing their coverage,” said Katie Conner, a spokeswoman for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
Conner said her boss, who is party to the lawsuit, believes pre-existing conditions should “always be covered.” In Arizona, more than 1 in 4 adults under 65 has a pre-existing condition, according to the data.
The state with the highest rate of adults with pre-existing conditions is West Virginia — 36 percent of those under age 65. That means that about 1 in 3 of them could have a hard time buying insurance through the individual marketplace without the ACA protections.
The office of West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who joined the legal challenge against the ACA, declined to comment. But a spokesman for Morrisey’s re-election campaign told Politifact last month that “help should be provided to those who need it most, including those with pre-existing conditions.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit “are paying lip service to these critical protections for people, but they are in fact engaged in a strategy that would get rid of those protections,” said Justin Giovannelli, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “Frankly, it’s hard to square what they’re saying on the one hand and what they’re arguing in the courts on the other.”
According to a poll released in June, also by the Kaiser Family Foundation, three-quarters of Americans say that maintaining protections for people with pre-existing conditions is “very important.” This includes majorities of Democratic, Republican and independent voters.
Before the health law was adopted, insurance companies routinely denied coverage to millions of people with pre-existing conditions who purchased insurance through the individual marketplace.
If they didn’t deny coverage outright, some health plans charged consumers exorbitant premiums, or offered policies that excluded coverage for pricey conditions. (Although many people got insurance through their employers or public plans that covered pre-existing conditions, they could have been left vulnerable if their employment status or other circumstances changed.)
The ACA ended those practices.
Common conditions that led insurance companies to deny coverage included high blood pressure, cancer, obesity, diabetes and depression, among many others. Some people were denied for having acne, asthma or for being pregnant.
The KFF analysis estimated that at least 27 percent of adults under 65 — more than 50 million Americans — had at least one pre-existing condition that would have jeopardized their coverage pre-aca. The foundation said its estimates were an undercount because some diseases that insurers cited when declining coverage are not in the survey data. Also, each insurance company set its own rules and conditions for denials, making accurate counts of those who could be affected hard to nail down.
Less precise estimates by other researchers and the Department of Health and Human Services show that up to half of all adults under age 65 have at least one pre-existing condition.