Obamacare Might Not Cover Your Preexisting Condition - Just when you think you’ve heard it all

By Robert Book, Contributor to Forbes.com

How many times have we heard, over the last three and a half years, that one of the primary and most popular features of Obamacare is that no one could be denied coverage for a preexisting condition? It turns out that this is just another one of the false claims used to sell the public on a health care reform that seems to move every aspect of health care in the wrong direction.

The Affordable Care Act does indeed specify, in Section 1201, that “a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not impose any preexisting condition exclusion with respect to such plan or coverage.” In other words, a health plan cannot deny enrollment, or the plan’s benefits, to someone based on that person’s preexisting.

However, that is not the same as saying that a plan has to include coverage for any particular preexisting condition, and it certainly does not mean a plan has to include coverage for ongoing treatment that a patient started before obtain coverage in an exchange plan on January 1, 2014.

Key to understanding this distinction is that having “health coverage” is not the same as actually obtaining “health care.” The insurance plan has to take anyone who wants to enroll, regardless of their health status or health history – but they don’t have to provide the same treatments, the same doctors, or the same medications that a patient has been receiving.