The Broken Link: Braidwood, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), and the Health Equity Implications of Losing Free Access to Preventive Care
Authors: Kaplan Elizabeth , Dairkee Anu 
Published: December 2024

Braidwood Management, Inc. v. Becerra threatens the nationwide enforceability of the preventive care mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with respect to a variety of preventive health care services. The success of this lawsuit could have devastating repercussions. Not only would many current guidelines of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) be affected, but future preventive care recommendations would be as well, to the detriment of achieving health equity goals. This Article posits that the loss of guaranteed free preventive care could threaten current and future health equity gains. If preventive care is no longer offered without cost-sharing, research shows that many people, especially those with lower socioeconomic status, will not access the care. This decrease in access to recommended screenings and other preventive services would likely decrease uptake, over time impacting the stage at which diseases such as cancer are diagnosed, making late-stage diagnoses with poorer prognoses more common, and increasing transmission of other conditions such as HIV. At the population level, decreased access to free preventive care could hinder efforts to reduce entrenched inequalities associated with these conditions.

Moreover, these effects will be amplified as insured people lose access to preventive care recommendations that evolve in response to new research findings. In the years since the ACA’s passage, the USPSTF has brought a health equity lens to each step of its recommendation process, including how it chooses preventive services to study, how it designs and conducts its research plan, and its approach to issuing recommendations along with calls for more research. Although some have argued that the resulting shift in the USPSTF’s recommendations has not happened fast enough, the way in which the USPSTF structures its evidentiary reviews — with a focus on high-level literature reviews of medical studies — suggests that over time, as individual studies continue to examine the effectiveness of interventions in different populations and publish their results, the shift will become more dramatic and the resulting recommendations will be more effective at combating health care disparities. If Braidwood is successful, no-cost insurance coverage for these more responsive recommended services could be undermined.

This Article explores the potential impact Braidwood could have on existing and anticipated advances in preventive care through a focus on two life-threatening conditions: cancer and HIV. Both cancer and HIV preventive care recommendations have undergone significant changes since the implementation of the preventive care mandate. While the resulting recommendations remain imperfect, the Article shows the important and evolving relationship between these recommendations and efforts to overcome pervasive and entrenched disparities in health outcomes related to these conditions.If Braidwood is upheld, ongoing efforts to reduce disparities in cancer and HIV will be stymied.