I have a pre-existing medical condition. If you are a woman, you do too. A woman of reproductive age could need maternity care. If a woman is pregnant or has given birth to a child, she is at risk for postpartum complications, both short- and long-term. Anyone who’s had a C-section could have scar tissue that could cause problems down the road. It’s ridiculous that insurance companies used to charge women higher rates, or even deny coverage, simply based on their gender.

The End of Medical Underwriting

When you take gender out of the equation, pre-existing conditions are still everywhere. Pre-existing conditions affect us all one way or another. If you don’t have one, you know someone who does. It doesn’t matter how old you are. It doesn’t matter how healthy you look.

The Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight, a division of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimated that 50% of Americans under 65 and 86% of adults over 65 had a pre-existing medical condition. Those statistics from 2011 came out just after the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, and just before the provision of the ACA officially put an end to medical underwriting in 2014.

Medical underwriters could no longer use your medical history to charge you more for coverage, and they certainly could no longer deny you coverage. As a result, millions of people who had been denied coverage in the past finally got health insurance.

A List of Declinable Conditions

Having a pre-existing condition means that you have a medical problem before you start on a new health plan. Before the Affordable Care Act, private insurers used a process called medical underwriting to decide whether or not you qualified for coverage. They could charge you more for having certain conditions. Worse, they could offer you less coverage.

A review of insurance literature by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that some of these declinable conditions included: AIDS/HIV, alcohol abuse, Alzheimer’s disease, bipolar disorder, cancer, cerebral palsy, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease with or without bypass surgery, Crohn’s disease, drug abuse, depression (severe), diabetes, eating disorders, emphysema, epilepsy, fibromyalgia, gender dysphoria. hemophilia, hepatitis, kidney disease, lupus, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, obesity (severe), organ transplant, paraplegia, paralysis, Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, pregnancy, rheumatoid arthritis, sleep apnea, stroke, and ulcerative colitis.

Back in the day and depending on the insurance company, having one of these conditions on your medical record could disqualify you from getting any coverage at all.

How Many People Have Declinable Pre-Existing Conditions?

Everyone hates fake news, so let’s take a look at some very real (and recent) statistics.

• As many as 6 million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease in the U.S.
• Diabetes and prediabetes affect 37.3 million and 96 million American adults respectively.
• 805,000 Americans have a heart attack every year.
• Nearly 10% of Americans have had a diagnosis of cancer in their lifetime.
• More than 795,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke every year.
• 6 million people have kidney disease.
• Nearly 5% of Americans over 18 years old suffer from depression at any given time.
• More than 42% of American adults are obese.

In 2019, Kaiser Family Foundation reported that 54 million people under 65 (27%) had a pre-existing condition considered “declinable” before the Affordable Care Act. The number increased to 44% for people between 55 and 64 and was also higher for women. They did not include Medicare in the analysis because coverage and cost were never based on pre-existing conditions.

Pre-Existing Conditions Are Not Anyone’s Fault

Perhaps one of the most painful things about having a pre-existing condition is the blame and shame often associated with it. Too many people are blamed for things out of their control.

You hear Representative Mo Brooks (R-Ala) say that people with pre-existing conditions should “contribute more to the insurance pool” to offset the cost “to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.”

People with pre-existing conditions do not lead healthy lives? Think again.

Then there are the Twitter comments from former Representative Joe Walsh (R-Ill): “Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care,” after television host Jimmy Kimmel publicly spoke about his newborn son being born with a congenital heart condition. Kimmel’s son had to undergo life-saving heart surgery in his first days of life.

Children should be punished for being born?

Why We Need to Get Rid of Pre-Existing Conditions

These sorts of judgments show more than a lack of compassion. They show a lack of a moral compass.

They also show a lack of understanding of how health insurance works. People pay into a health plan, not because those dollars are going to be put aside for them. They pay so that when they need care, they can get care. In the meantime, those dollars are used for other people who need care now. So I hate to tell you, Representative Walsh, but you are ALWAYS paying for someone else’s healthcare.

No matter how well someone treats their body, no matter how well they eat or how much they exercise, they are not exempt from getting sick. We are born with the genes our parents gave us, and some of those genes may increase our risk for certain medical conditions. We live in environments that could expose us to different chemicals and toxins. Some people cannot afford food or basic needs. Accidents happen, leading to unexpected injuries. People are abused and traumatized. The world is not always kind.

People should not be punished for their life circumstances. To put a price on their misfortune is the lowest form of depravity.