Last Thursday, a federal judge in Texas blocked the Affordable Care Act mandate for health insurance companies to provide preventive care. Elie, you tweeted, “FedSoc judge in Texas gutted the preventive care parts of Obamacare, nationwide. So… now the party of forced birth won’t force insurance companies to cover basic prenatal care.” Elie, you have a piece titled “The GOP’s War on Obamacare Is Screwing Up Its War on Abortion.” Talk about what’s at stake here.
Yeah, so, one of the most life-saving aspects of the Affordable Care Act is the fact that it forces insurance companies to cover preventative care. People forget, before the Affordable Care Act, it was actually very hard to get insurance companies to cover preventative care. So, if you were poor or even middle-class, a lot of times it was more cost-effective for you to get sick, because then your insurance would kick in. Trying to take steps to not get sick would be prohibitively expensive before Obamacare, right? So, that’s what Obamacare fixed.
And, of course, because conservatives don’t like Obamacare and don’t like that there was — you know, “don’t like a Black person giving you healthcare. How did that happen?” So, the FedSoc judges — this one in particular, Reed O’Connor in Texas, who has made it his life’s mission to destroy Obamacare — have gutted that section. There are basically three agencies that determine what is preventative care or not. O’Connor gutted one of them. And that’s the — I’m forgetting the acronym right now. But the task force that he gutted is the one that covers, among other things, cancer screenings, HIV transmission preventative drugs, and prenatal care. And the hypocrisy of these people, who out of one side of their mouth will literally force women to give birth, to bring pregnancies to term against their will, but then won’t cover, won’t force insurance companies to cover prenatal
— source democracynow.org | Apr 03, 2023