Thankfully, the US passed the recent national health care law which, I believe, bans such discrimination as of 2014 and brings us that much closer to being a civilized country.
However, the lawsuit by the states (for example Virginia) is to have the statue about individuals being required to purchase healthcare declared unconstitutional. They will then use this to argue that the whole law unconstitutional if they win (no severance clause in the law). I heard this on NPR last night in an interview with the attorney general of virginia about their strategy....
Presumably if they can identify patients with high likelihoods of returning they can take extra precautions while they are in the hospital the first time. Potentially this could be used to stop unnecessary hospital visits (via education, proactive treatment, outpatient care, etc).
