Trump Health Official Vows to Protect Patients with Pre-Existing Conditions
Health Care

Trump Health Official Vows to Protect Patients with Pre-Existing Conditions

Kevin Lamarque

The Trump administration has argued that Obamacare’s protections for pre-existing conditions should be ruled unconstitutional in a Texas court challenge brought by 20 Republican-led states. On Tuesday, Seema Verma, Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, vowed to keep those protections in place if the legal challenge succeeds.

“I think that we need to have protections in place for those individuals. If the law changes in some way, I would work with Congress to make sure we had protections in place for people with preexisting conditions,” Verma said in a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Verma was grilled about the administration’s position by Democrats on the panel. “There doesn’t seem to be any urgency about the fact this lawsuit is moving its way through the courts and could blow up all of the protections,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said, according to The Hill.

Arguments in the Texas case are set for September 5.

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