One of President Trump’s top health officials vowed Tuesday to help Congress pass a law to keep protections for people with pre-existing illnesses in place if a legal effort by the Trump administration to gut them is successful.
“My job is to implement the law, and if the law changes in some way, I would work with Congress to make sure that we had protections in place for people with pre-existing conditions,” Seema Verma, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a Senate hearing.
The hearing marked the first time that Verma has testified before the Senate, and it took place in the shadow of the latest Obamacare lawsuit that would do away with protections for people with pre-existing conditions, such as cancer and diabetes.
Verma said she was concerned for the group of people in question, but declined to share whether she had weighed in on the Trump administration’s decision, saying that she couldn’t speak to a pending lawsuit.
“I’m deeply concerned about individuals with pre-existing conditions, and I think we need to have protections in place for those individuals,” she said.
The Trump administration’s actions on Obamacare are the result of a suit filed by 20 states, arguing that because the tax bill signed into law by Trump late last year eliminated the Obamacare penalties for going uninsured beginning in 2019, the rest of the law must also fall.
Instead of defending Obamacare, lawyers for the Department of Justice agreed with the plaintiffs that Obamacare wasn’t constitutional, but specifically asked the court to strike down the regulations requiring insurers offer coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, such as cancer or diabetes, and to do so without charging them more.
These parts, the Trump administration is arguing, cannot be severed from the individual mandate that requires most people to obtain healthcare coverage. A judge has set the oral argument for Sept. 5 for the case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
Though both Republicans and Democrats have said that they believe the protections should stay in place, they haven’t moved to pass a law that would do so. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said in the hearing that she thought Congress should work to cement the law as soon as possible, before it continued to make its way through the courts.
“There does not seem to be any sense of urgency about the fact that this lawsuit is moving its way through the court and could blow up all protections,” she said.
