One of the most important parts of the Affordable Care Act is its requirement that insurance companies cover preventive care. As we approach a full generation of people who have come of age under the protections provided by the ACA, it’s easy to forget that in the before times, it was incredibly difficult for poor people to get preventive care, and prohibitively expensive for middle-class people to do the same. That meant that a lot of times, people just had to wait to get sick before their insurance plans even kicked in. It meant that a lot of people wouldn’t get mammograms or colonoscopies. It meant a lot more “negative health care outcomes” and human suffering.
That critical and life-saving aspect of the ACA has, for now, been gutted by one man: US District Judge of the Northern District of Texas Reed O’Connor. O’Connor, who was appointed to the bench by George W. Bush, is a far-right extremophile who has made it his life’s mission to destroy the ACA. He has tried to take down the act multiple times, including once when he declared the individual mandate at the heart of the law unconstitutional. And on Thursday, he fired his latest salvo against the ACA by overturning the part of the law that requires insurance companies to cover several kinds of preventive care, from cancer screenings to PrEP, the drug that prevents the transmission of HIV.
O’Connor is regularly overturned by his conservative brethren on the Supreme Court, which should give you an indication of just how far afield he is from even the standard right-
— source thenation.com | Elie Mystal | Mar 31, 2023