This aspect is against President Barack Obama's 2010 Affordable Care Act, which clearly outlawed any sort of discrimination based on pre-existing conditions.
As per the Act, insurers in no case cannot ask about current or past illnesses. They can also not charge more from people with diabetes or cancer as compared to what it charges from the healthy people, neither can they deny any coverage.
It seems as if the insurers have still managed to find a way to discriminate anyway. In this context, the researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health wrote that insurers are now resorting to other tactics to dissuade high-cost patients from enrolling.
For this research, co-author of the study Ben Sommers and Douglas Jacobs analyzed 48 Obamacare policies in 12 states using the federal Healthcare. gov marketplace. They observed that in 2014, there were 12 policies that covered HIV drugs called nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors, including generics, in tiers with at least a 30% co-pay, usually the highest and there were some that did not cover any of the drugs at all.
This means that insurance companies might be charging the sickest patients extra for drugs under the federal health law as an effort to discourage them from choosing certain plans.
John Peller, president of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, said, "This matches what we've seen in Illinois, where four of seven plans have what we consider unaffordable HIV drugs. We think insurers are looking for ways to make plans less welcoming to people with chronic conditions".
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