Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurers and group health plans must cover “preventive health services” at no additional cost to the patient. The Affordable Care Act does not specify what those “preventive health services” are. Instead, the law gives the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force – an independent panel of experts – the power to determine which preventive services insurers must cover.
The task force is made up of 16 volunteers, each of whom serves a four-year term. Members of the task force and their recommendations are required by law to be “independent, and to the extent practicable, not subject to political pressure.”
The task force’s recommendations for required preventive-care services include contraception, cancer screenings, statin medications, and human-papilloma-virus vaccines. In June 2019, the task force recommended that pre-exposure prophylaxis, known as PrEP, medicine that is highly effective at preventing HIV, be included as a mandatory preventive-care service.
But think of the freedom we’ll experience when insurance companies have even less responsibility to their clients.