> drop your coverage if you got sick and became too expensive to insure (recission)
Yeah, the significance of rescission and the ACA's prohibition is often overlooked. Prior to the ACA, if you got sick enough and expensive enough, insurance companies could -- while you had outstanding claims, and this happened while people were in the hospital -- retroactively cancel your insurance, refund your premiums, and walk away leaving you fully liable not only for any future healthcare, but for anything they hadn't paid for yet from the time when you had coverage. Now, this could generally only be done based on an omission or inaccuracy in initial disclosures, usually related to a preexisting condition, but there was no requirement (federally, some states had controls) that the be intentional or significant, and insurance companies would hunt out errors once care got expensive.
The ACA elimination of exclusion for preexisting conditions itself elominated most of the basis for rescission and the onerous disclosure requirements that it was based on errors in, but the ACA also explicitly prohibited it except for fraud or intentional misrepresentation of material facts.
Yeah, the significance of rescission and the ACA's prohibition is often overlooked. Prior to the ACA, if you got sick enough and expensive enough, insurance companies could -- while you had outstanding claims, and this happened while people were in the hospital -- retroactively cancel your insurance, refund your premiums, and walk away leaving you fully liable not only for any future healthcare, but for anything they hadn't paid for yet from the time when you had coverage. Now, this could generally only be done based on an omission or inaccuracy in initial disclosures, usually related to a preexisting condition, but there was no requirement (federally, some states had controls) that the be intentional or significant, and insurance companies would hunt out errors once care got expensive.
The ACA elimination of exclusion for preexisting conditions itself elominated most of the basis for rescission and the onerous disclosure requirements that it was based on errors in, but the ACA also explicitly prohibited it except for fraud or intentional misrepresentation of material facts.