The gears of American government are supposed to grind s l o w l y. Like molasses flowing uphill slowly. In winter. This is to protect us from emotional, knee-jerk policy, and to allow reasoned, public discussion and debate. Under our system, we the people know what a bill says before it passes, and we are given time to consider how it will impact us, our families, our neighbors, and our communities. It's also a good way to tell whether the people we elect are representing our priorities. No matter what they say, nothing shows a politician's agenda better than their voting record.
Our current Congress (the 115th), should know better, but, spurred on by an administration that doesn't understand how government works, it has repeatedly diverged from "regular order." Instead, lawmakers are attempting to rush things through state and Federal legislatures without giving us the opportunity to catch up. In fact, I suspect that it was Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) disgust with this lack of regular order that spared us from the outright repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) last year, not necessarily any major objection to the bill's purpose.
After the failed ACA repeal, it was a relief to hold on to our rights as patients. Or did we?
A lot has been going on in Washington since then. Amidst news on Russia probes, Olympics, and horrific school shootings, our political leadership has been busy hoping you wouldn't notice a few little bills that slowly chip away at ACA protections as well as parts of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has been around much longer.
Trump's tax bill already gutted the primary funding mechanism for the ACA. Here are some of the government’s 2018 efforts to both undermine and protect the ACA. For better or worse, each will have a profound effect on large sections of the chronic and autoimmune community:
- HR 3976: The Access to Marketplace Insurance Act – Probably the most common way to change things is through Federal legislation. The majority passes bills with hidden clauses or new laws and the states have to follow that rule. In this case, the House has introduced a bill to correct a bad loophole in the ACA. It bars charities from helping patients pay for their insurance premiums. For some reason, in at least 42 states, they are interpreting a line in the ACA to mean that only the one specific charity named – the Ryan White Foundation – is allowed to help instead of using that as a precedent to say all charities can help. If you would like to help see this bill passed, contact (write, call, email, Tweet) your Representative in the House. Let them know that you feel strongly that this is a wrong that needs to be righted. It’s nice to write in support of a bill for once.
- Step Therapy Bills – Another prime example of why we shouldn’t just let the states do what they want (see above). Though the states do good work in a lot of areas, most don’t in healthcare. Many states (14 with existing legislation and another 12 with legislation pending in 2017) allow insurance companies -- which often don’t employ doctors with expertise in your specific condition, and certainly don’t know the intricacies of your case -- to decide that they know better than a patient’s doctor. These states already allow or are trying to allow insurance companies to force patients to try less expensive treatments and fail before allowing access to the prescribed treatment. Some also allow extended prior authorization times. These practices can worsen a patient’s condition and, in extreme cases, cause irreparable harm. With these bills, we have to write our representatives on the state level. The bright side: state level legislators require fewer voter contacts to make an issue a priority and things happen a lot faster in statehouses. Oh, and both Florida and Oregon are doing the right thing, and have introduced state legislation to protect patients against these types of actions.
- HR 620: The ADA Education and Reform Act – This one’s a doozy. And it has already passed the House. Basically, the bill makes it a lot harder for disabled people to get equal access to buildings. It introduces a process that would allow businesses to potentially wait years to make legally mandated Americans with Disabilities Act accommodations. It also seeks to promote mediation and other “alternative dispute resolution mechanisms” over lawsuits. This is not intended to help the disabled person. The best way to stop this bill is to make sure it doesn’t pass the Senate. So far the House bill has been received in the Senate, but hasn’t been assigned a number yet. Watch this space for updates, and in the meantime send your letters, emails, Tweets, or calls in the direction of both of the Senators for your state. You could even get your friends in other states to do the same.
- Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) expands short-term insurance plans – Another way for the administration to take away patient rights is to alter the interpretation of some rules and regulations. In this case, they have expanded the period of allowed coverage for short-term insurance plans from three months to 364 days. These are meant to be stopgap measures if you decide to take time off between jobs or after 26-year-olds have to leave their parents’ plans. They often pay out less than half of what consumers pay in, and they are allowed to kick people off their coverage after major diagnoses, like cancer. There’s not a lot to do about policies enacted through the legislative branch except voting the President out of office (he and his appointees set agency agendas). You can always lodge a complaint with the agency, but executive branch employees have less at stake than legislative branch employees.
