End The Insurance Gap For People With Preexisting Conditions

For the 12.6 million Americans who have preexisting health care issues and have been turned down by insurance companies in the past three-plus years.

The good news: The health care reform law's stopgap Preexisting Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) program will get you to 2014, when discriminating by preexisting condition will be illegal.

The bad news: You have to put your health problems on hold for six months.

In 2014, it will be illegal to discriminate against any American who has a preexisting health condition when applying for health insurance. Since there are millions of Americans with preexisting conditions (over 57 million of us under the age of 65 - one in five of us), the health care law set up a high-risk pool in each state to allow those who have been turned down by insurance companies to buy insurance at a reasonable cost until the full enactment of the law in 2014. There were political fights about these pools - some people viewed them as a sneaky way to create a public option - and a recent Washington Post article suggests that there might not be enough money allocated to the programs. The states had a choice between creating the pools themselves or letting the government set them up, and the feds were pleased that they were able to set up all the pools within six months. But as of November 1, 2010, only a little more than 8,000 people have qualified for the pools.

One of the reasons that enrollment is so low could be that the law has a serious Achilles heel: You can't be accepted into the PCIP high-risk pool until you've gone six months without any health care.

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