The District of Columbia recently took an important step to protect health insurance coverage by creating a District-specific health insurance requirement.  This is in response to the unexpected termination of the federal health insurance requirement, which Congress narrowly passed last December.  The Affordable Care Act had required that federal taxpayers, except some with low incomes, to have health insurance or pay a federal income tax penalty.  The underlying logic was that this would incentivize more people to get coverage and prevent insurance premiums from rising for the great majori

Last year the legislative effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act collapsed, and it seemed that the ACA’s most important protection – non-discriminatory access to health insurance for people with pre-existing health conditions – was saved.   Now Americans once again are facing an existential threat to this most basic guarantee.  The cause: a lawsuit filed in February, 2018, by 20 states to overturn the ACA in its entirety as an unconstitutional act