Health Care Reform Passes

According to the House Democrats blog, the changes listed below happen immediately:

* Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans;

* Provide immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition through a temporary high-risk pool;

* Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all individual plans;

* Lower seniors prescription drug prices by beginning to close the donut hole*;

* Offer tax credits to small businesses to purchase coverage;

* Eliminate lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits in all plans;

* Require plans to cover an enrollee’s dependent children until age 26;

* Require new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;

* Ensure consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal new insurance plan decisions;

* Require premium rebates to enrollees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and require public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.

Now we can spend the next several years watching the insurance companies try to chip away parts of this bill.



*The gap in the Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage plan. Recipient prescriptions were covered by the plan as long as they did not spend more that $2,700 a year. Then they were responsible for paying for their own drugs until that cost reached $6,100 a year. This meant people on Medicare were left paying for all prescriptions that cost them between $2,700.99 and $6,099.99 a year.