DOJ ‘should do its duty’ to defend protections for pre-existing conditions, says Collins

With some 590,000 Mainers — roughly 45 percent of her home state’s population — suffering from asthma, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) thinks it’s time the federal government takes a new tack and defends legal protections for such pre-existing conditions.

“This is no small matter,” Sen. Collins wrote in a June 27 letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, citing Kaiser Family Foundation 2016 estimates that 27 percent of American adults under age 65 have pre-existing conditions that would leave them uninsurable in the individual health insurance marketplace.

“More recently, 57 percent of Americans responding to a poll said that they or someone in their household suffers from a pre-existing condition,” she wrote. “These numbers include 590,000 Mainers.”

Sen. Collins wrote that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) should reconsider its recent decision not to defend such critical consumer protections made during ongoing litigation at the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas challenging the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

In explaining why the DOJ made that decision, Sessions argued in June 7 correspondence sent to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) that the ACA’s provisions protecting people with pre-existing conditions “are not severable from the individual mandate, and cannot survive if that provision is struck down as unconstitutional.”

“Respectfully, I disagree,” Sen. Collins wrote in her letter to Sessions.

“I want to make clear that my concern is to protect individuals with pre-existing conditions, not to defend the individual mandate,” she continued, agreeing with the decision by Congress to eliminate the penalty under the individual mandate as part of the approved Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law last year.

The senator also agreed with Sessions that the individual mandate will become unconstitutional as a tax when it stops producing revenue beginning in 2019.

“But it does not follow that eliminating this penalty requires that important consumer protections – such as provisions ensuring that Americans with pre-existing conditions have access to health insurance – must also fall,” wrote Sen. Collins. “If Congress had intended to eliminate these consumer protections along with the individual mandate, it could have done so. It chose not to.”

The senator concluded that the DOJ “should do its duty and defend the important consumer protections in the ACA, particularly those that ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can secure insurance.”