Under The New Health Care Bill, Rape Could Be A Pre-Existing Condition

House Republicans narrowly passed legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, after adding $8 billion to the bill aimed at reassuring moderate Republicans worried about higher costs for people with pre-existing conditions. But an amendment added to the bill (after it failed to muster enough votes the first go-around) effectively gives states permission to discriminate against women, opponents say, including survivors of sexual assault.  As Gina Scaramella, executive director of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, argued in an Op-ed for The Hill, the so-called “MacArthur-Meadows amendment” lets states waive the Obamacare ban on charging higher premiums for women who have been raped, for example — which is a thing that actually happened pre-Obamacare. “In one widely reported case, a 45-year-old woman met two men at a bar in Florida who bought her a drink. Hours later, she found herself lying by the side of the road with injuries indicating that she had been raped and that the men had spiked her drink. Her doctor prescribed a treatment of anti-viral, post-HIV exposure drugs to protect against HIV transmission,” Scaramella wrote to explain what women who were victims of sexual assault experienced before Obamacare.  “When the woman lost her health insurance several months after the attack, she was unable to obtain new insurance due to the health care treatment she had received for the assault,&...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news