In a blog posted yesterday on The Commonwealth Fund website, it appears detail to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could remove benefit requirements, giving insurers more flexibility to exclude benefits and leave enrollees without coverage for the health care services they need.

“If the ACA is replaced with a series of policies that don’t contain a minimum federal standard for health benefits, consumers can expect a return to a patchwork system where the adequacy of a person’s coverage varies widely depending on where they live,” according to Dania Palanker, JoAnn Volk and Justin Giovannelli, authors of the blog.

Our own W. Stephen Love, president/CEO of the DFW Hospital Council, says the real test of any insurance product is the actuarial test regarding the spreading of risks.

“Plans need healthy participants, generally younger people, to help spread/absorb the risks associated with sicker individuals,” Love said. “We spread the expense of chronic illness like diabetes, cancer and heart disease across the entire patient population pool. When we begin cherry-picking essential health benefits like maternity, mental illness and other coverage by removing them from the total population pool, we generally create hardships for someone in the form of no coverage or higher out-of-pocket costs. We need to be extremely careful as we modify essential health benefits because we are impacting the treatment of many individuals.”

You can read the full blog here.