Making Health Care Reform Work for Americans with Disabilities: SummaryInformation on Five 'Town Meetings' on Health Care Reform: A Report to the President and the Congress of the United States

摘要

Private health insurance companies frequently deny people with disabilities anycoverage at all or provide only limited coverage, often for exorbitantly expensive premium levels. This is frequently due to the exclusion of 'pre-existing conditions' in many private health insurance plans. Simply put, people with disabilities cannot receive coverage because of this form of legalized discrimination. While it may be true that certain people with disabilities might require increased medical services, the actuarial information utilized by many private insurance companies to determine whether an individual is eligible for coverage often 'lumps' people into very large disability categories (e.g. 'cerebral palsy') and provides for exclusion based on these categories, without an individualized determination. And while the Americans with Disabilities Act contains some very weak provisions concerning health care insurance discrimination against people with disabilities, much of this actuarial information used to exclude people with disabilities is quite out-of-date and does not reflect the tremendous progress that has occurred over the past twenty years in treating and ameliorating the effects of disabilities, the explosion of progress in medical and assistive technology devices which substantially improve health status, and the remarkably increased life expectancy for many persons with disabilities. Thus, private health care insurance plans effectively exclude many people with disabilities from coverage.