Ensuring Benefits Parity and Gender Identity Nondiscrimination in Essential Health Benefits
As the Affordable Care Act begins to take effect, it's vital that the essential health benefit standards that states adopt include transgender Americans, as well as other underserved populations.
By Kellan Baker and Andrew Cray | November 15, 2012
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/report/2012/11/15/44948/ensuring-benefits-parity-and-gender-identity-nondiscrimination-in-essential-health-benefits/At the core of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the most comprehensive overhaul of the American health insurance system since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid more than 40 years ago. In particular, the health reform law enacts an important change to the private insurance industry: It creates the framework for a minimum set of essential benefits that many plans in every state will have to cover. As our nation begins a robust discussion of what constitutes appropriately comprehensive insurance coverage, nondiscrimination in plan design must rank alongside cost and quality as a fundamental consideration for regulators, policymakers, and insurance carriers themselves. These actors must define and address the impermissible discrimination against consumers purchasing insurance products based on the essential benefit standard during this crucial period before the essential benefits provision comes into force in 2014. If they do not, it will seriously undermine the health reform law's goal of promoting equitable, comprehensive, and affordable coverage for all Americans.
This issue brief explores the problem of insurance discrimination from the perspective of one of the clearest and most widespread examples of arbitrary discrimination in plan design: coverage exclusions targeting transgender people for denial of benefits that are routinely covered for nontransgender people.
