Actress Alyssa Milano, offering her medical resume as a reason to trumpet the virtues of Obamacare and its provisions for covering people with preexisting conditions, tweeted this:
Milano might want to bone up on information pertaining to Americans and preexisting conditions; as Health Care maven Avik Roy pointed out, most health coverage in America already prevents insurance companies from ignoring those with pre-existing conditions:
[P]rior to Obamacare, the vast majority of Americans with health insurance were already in plans that were required to offer them coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions. Employer-based plans were required to offer coverage to everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. So were Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs like the VA. Employer- and government-based plans, prior to Obamacare, represented 90 percent of Americans with health insurance. The other 10 percent were people buying coverage on their own, on the individual market. In most—but not all—states prior to Obamacare, people buying coverage on their own could, in theory, be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition.
As Roy wrote in 2012, “A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study found that only 3.5 percent of the 55 million uninsured were uninsured because their health was too poor to qualify. On the other hand, 71 percent blamed the high cost of insurance for their lack of it …Obamacare’s approach to pre-existing conditions may help a small number with pre-existing conditions to gain coverage in the short term by driving up the cost of insurance for everyone else, leading to adverse selection and higher premiums for all.”
Only one day before her tweet about preexisting conditions, Milano posited that white men over 50 don’t have sex any more:
One preexisting condition unmentioned by Milano was stupidity. It’s actually quite surprising that Obamacare, designed by Democrats, did not mention that as a preexisting condition, since they all seem to suffer from it.