The argument the Trump administration is making to gut Obamacare’s protections for people with pre-existing illnesses is the same stance the Obama administration once took, President Trump’s health chief said Wednesday.
Alex Azar, secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, was speaking about the Department of Justice’s request for a court to undo the Obamacare-created requirements that health insurers must sell coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses and cannot charge them more than other customers. By taking this stance, the Department of Justice is agreeing with a lawsuit filed by 20 states saying that repeal of the individual mandate, the Obamacare penalty for going uninsured, makes Obamacare unconstitutional.
Azar said that he “of course” supported the conclusions the Trump administration had drawn, and said it was similar to the position the Obama administration took when it argued the legality of the individual mandate before the Supreme Court in 2012.
“If you were to strike down the individual mandate, guaranteed issue and community rating are inextricably linked and must fall as a requirement of statutory interpretation,” Azar said at a Washington Post Live event, describing the position and using the formal name for the Obamacare provisions.
In a recent congressional hearing, Azar did not say whether he supported the lawsuit.
The case will take months to resolve and could go through several appeals. Democrats and health insurers have spoken out against the move, and Republicans have said they want to preserve protections for people with pre-existing illnesses, which include conditions such as cancer or diabetes. Congressional law experts have argued that Congress did not intend for the protections to go away when they repealed the fine that penalizes people for going uninsured, beginning in 2019.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn, who is chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has called the case “as far-fetched as any I’ve ever heard.”
“Congress specifically repealed the individual mandate penalty, but I didn’t hear a single senator say that they also thought they were repealing protections for people with pre-existing conditions,” he said.
