Families USA, the national organization for health care consumers, supports nationally enforceable consumer protections. These protections must be designed to ensure that health plan enrollees receive the care they were promised by their health plans. They must include basic protections covering a wide range of consumer concerns, and they must apply to all health plans. The public needs federal legislation because the protections that do exist today constitute a veritable patchwork quilt that is indecipherable and has many holes. Enormous differences exist today in the protections that are afforded to people based on the accidental happenstance of a consumer's state of residence and the payer and form of that consumer's health plan.
Enormous differences exist in the protections provided by one state versus another.
Enormous differences also exist among people within the same state, especially between those who get their coverage from an employer who is fully insured compared to those who get coverage from employers that self-insure and compared even further to those who buy their insurance coverage independently. Consumers need greater clarity and predictability about the basic protections that are guaranteed to them. National standards should establish a basic foundation that nobody can fall through. One of the reasons we support H. R. 526 is that it creates such a basic foundation that everyone will be able to rely on. There are three types of variations.