Section 1001

Yes, Section 1001 is the first section. Hey – don’t blame me, I didn’t number this crazy thing.

The first four sections of the PPACA are grouped under the title “Immediate Improvements in Health Care Coverage for All Americans”. The first of these sections, section 1001, does several things. In part, it amends a previous document, the Public Health Service Act. This Act, enacted in 1944 with subsequent revisions, essentially created the Department of Health and Human Services. DHHS includes many federal agencies, with the most recognizable being the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, and the biggy, CMS. For those of you unfamiliar with acronym bingo, the first makes sure your meat contains a minimum of rat parts, the second tries to keep Contagion from becoming reality, the third trains scientists, and the last is Medicare and Medicaid.

Rather than changing existing text, the first part of section 1001, of the PPACA adds protections for the consumer of health care. Lifetime limits are removed completely. Annual limits are subject to certain requirements. It does allow annual limits on items that are not considered “essential health benefits”. These, benefits (defined in part 1302(b) of the PPACA, which is about 45 pages later than where we are) include ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance abuse treatment, prescription drugs, rehabilitation, lab services, preventative care, chronic disease management, and pediatric care, including dental and vision. I’m not therefore, sure exactly what isn’t essential care – maybe things that are covered under certain plans, like IVF, or elective surgeries, can still have limits. But that’s a heck of a lot of things that are now unlimited.

This part also removes rescission – or the ability of a health insurer to drop you because you are too expensive. The actual rates of rescission are hard to identify. Insurance companies have no incentive, and no compulsion, to publish these rates. As of the passage of PPACA, however, they can only drop you for fraud. They can try really, really hard to find ‘fraud’, but it does mean that there is some burden of proof standard that has to be followed.

Preventative care is the next section. It eliminates cost-sharing (co-pays or deductibles) for several items. Those services recommended, and rated ‘A’ or ‘B’ by the Preventative Task Force. This list is not very long – I’ve included a link here: Task Force Recommendations ; immunizations recommended by the CDC, all preventative care for children recommended by the Health Resources and Services Administration; preventative care for women recommended by the same agency, and not included in those from the Preventative Task Force.  Plans are not prohibited from adding additional services.

Does preventative care save money? Evidence is mixed, with much of it depending on how much health care the people saved through preventative care will consume in the future, and whether or not that care will be more expensive or less.  And preventative care unequivocally saves lives.

Coverage is extended until children turn 26 – without the restrictions of being in school. Given the state of the jobless recovery, this isn’t a bad thing for most people. Presumably this will end up being cost-effective, since those insuranceless 24 year olds will no longer just hoof it to the ER when they get the sniffles.

Then there are a whole list of standards about how information about benefits will be given to the public, including how many pages (no more than 4), what type font (no less than 12), what language (culturally and linguistically appropriate), and content (definitions, exceptions, cost-sharing, examples, minimum essential coverage criteria, contact information). This may be an example of excessive government regulation, but there are sections of the original Public Service Act that dictate what level of radiation you have to use on X-rays, so this is not new for the government.

I originally thought I would try to do one section per day, but this is quite the dense document, so I’m going to take more days per section, as needed, and boy, does 1001 need it.