FACT CHECK: “No Proof That Kelly Loeffler Will Ensure Protections For Preexisting Conditions”

Loeffler’s Plan Is “Short On Details And Substance, And Long On Political Posturing”

“Like Giving A Family One Bag Of Sand To Protect Their Home As A Hurricane Rushes In”

A new PolitiFact fact check ruled unelected Senator Kelly Loeffler’s claim that her health care plan would protect people with pre-existing conditions as “False,” as experts once again blasted her “thinly detailed plan” for failing to live up to its promises.

Health policy experts shredded Loeffler’s plan as “short on details and substance, and long on political posturing,” and “like giving a family one bag of sand to protect their home as a hurricane rushes in.” Nonpartisan experts argued Loeffler’s plan would make affordable insurance “far less accessible” to people with health care issues and move those with pre-existing conditions onto plans offering “very limited and very expensive coverage.” 

While multiple experts “said the plan lacked so many details that they were forced to make assumptions about what it might or might not include,” Loeffler’s campaign “did not provide [PolitiFact] information to back up the senator’s claim that her proposal would ensure these protections.”

“Kelly Loeffler’s health care ‘plan’ is a sham whose only purpose is to distract from her toxic record of voting to support the dangerous lawsuit that would end protections for people with pre-existing conditions,” said DSCC spokesperson Helen Kalla. “Loeffler’s real agenda in the Senate is clear: dismantle the Affordable Care Act, gut protections for her constituents with pre-existing conditions, and kick thousands of Georgians off their health coverage.”

PolitiFact: No proof that Kelly Loeffler will ensure protections for preexisting conditions

By Tom Kertscher

Key Points:

• Republicans for years have worked to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, the law that established the gold standard for protecting people with preexisting health conditions against discrimination in insurance pricing and coverage. 

• Those efforts include a lawsuit — backed by the Trump administration and Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler — that would overturn Obamacare. The case is awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court.

• Now Loeffler, campaigning in one of two Jan. 5 Georgia runoff elections that will determine which party controls the Senate, has advanced a new health care proposal — a “framework” she claims will “ensure Americans with preexisting conditions are protected.”

• Previous GOP alternatives, including one from Georgia’s other senator, David Perdue, have fallen short of Obamacare’s protections for people with prior health problems. 

• Loeffler’s thinly detailed plan does, too. 

• “There is nothing in the Loeffler plan that indicates she would support the policies necessary to protect Americans against insurer discrimination,” said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy and management, and of political science, at the University of North Carolina. “The plan is short on details and substance, and long on political posturing.”

• The Loeffler campaign did not provide us information to back up the senator’s claim that her proposal would ensure these protections.

• The health care experts we spoke with said the plan lacked so many details that they were forced to make assumptions about what it might or might not include.  

• But Linda Blumberg, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center… said Loeffler’s plan “would make adequate, affordable insurance for people with problems far less accessible than it is under current law.”

• Blumberg and other experts pointed to two provisions in Loeffler’s plan in saying that it would provide less protection than the ACA. 

• Health care consultant Robert Laszewski noted that Loeffler’s proposal has a specific plan for those who want their preexisting conditions covered, whereas all individual plans in the ACA’s exchanges cover preexisting conditions. Her Guaranteed Coverage Plans provision “would seem to indicate she will have a plan that does not cover preexisting conditions, but then she will offer a special plan that will,” Laszewski said, alluding to high-risk plans that “tended to offer very limited and very expensive coverage.”

• The fact that people with preexisting conditions would need separate plans “sends a strong signal that they would no longer be guaranteed coverage or community rates in marketplace plans” as they are under the ACA, and “it seems likely that these plans would work like the high-risk pool plans,” said law professor Wendy Netter Epstein, director of DePaul University’s Health Law Institute. 

• “If those with preexisting conditions will only be able to get plans with fewer benefits and higher costs,” she added, “that explains why her proposal tries to help out low-income families with preexisting conditions with a one-time tax credit.” 

• Such a credit “is like giving a family one bag of sand to protect their home as a hurricane rushes in,” given that families with preexisting conditions can spend thousands of dollars more a year on medical care, said Allison Hoffman, a health care law expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.

• “There’s nothing substantive in Kelly Loeffler’s framework that would protect people with preexisting conditions anywhere near to the degree the Affordable Care Act does,” Hoffman said. 

• The plan lacks any detail to explain how it would provide protections that are at least as strong as the Affordable Care Act. Two of the plan’s provisions indicate it would make adequate and affordable insurance less accessible for people with preexisting conditions, experts say.

• Without evidence to back Loeffler’s claim, we rate it False.

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