Pelosi issues statement on implementation of key patient protection provisions in health insurance reform

Speaker Nancy Pelosi today issued the following statement on the Obama Administration's implementation of key patient protection provisions in health insurance reform.  Released 90 days after the law's enactment, these regulations form a new Patient's Bill of Rights for all Americans:

"With today's announcement of guidelines for the new Patient's Bill of Rights, the Democratic-led Congress and the Obama Administration are upholding our pledge of greater access, affordability, and reliability in Americans' insurance coverage.  And we are fulfilling the core promises of health reform: to protect patients, strengthen our middle class and small businesses, and put Americans and their doctor – not insurance company bureaucrats — in charge of medical care.

"The new Patient's Bill of Rights ensures that children with pre-existing conditions will no longer be denied care and that parents will no longer be job-locked because of a son or daughter's illness.  It bans the shameful practice of insurance companies dropping coverage when people get sick and prohibits insurers from placing lifetime limits on coverage.  It removes barriers to critical, life-saving emergency medical services, and allows women direct access to the OB/GYN doctor of their choice.

"Nearly 15 years after Congress first tried to pass a Patient's Bill of Rights, Democrats in Congress and President Obama enacted health insurance reform to put those rights into practice.  We are acting in the best interests of our middle class, Main Street, small businesses, and workers.

"Congressional Republicans are actively working to find ways to repeal these very protections – opening Americans up again to the worst practices of the insurance industry, and threatening to return us to a system of skyrocketing costs, unfair premium increases, and care denied to those who need it most.  Americans have waited too long just to have these rights taken away by the cynical politics of those who side with the monied special interests in Washington."