Last night President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress to outline his plan for healthcare, which included a promise to prevent insurance companies from discriminating against persons with pre-existing conditions, such as those with HIV/AIDS:

What this plan will do is make the insurance you have work better for you.  Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition.  As soon as I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it the most.  They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or in a lifetime.

Obama is attempting to address the problem many persons with HIV/AIDS have in securing affordable insurance. There is already a plan in place to provide basic HIV/AIDS care to those enrolled in Medicare, but those ineligible for the program may face discrimination from private insurance companies when they are not protected by law:

While insurance plans can exclude those with serious illnesses, large group plans rarely do so. If you are part of a small employee group, many states (including New York, New Jersey, California and Florida) now guarantee access to small group coverage regardless of your health, but in many other states, you can be excluded. If you are an individual purchaser, opportunities also vary from state to state.

Due to the high cost of HIV/AIDS care many insurance companies deny coverage to those living with the condition, a practice which shifts the burden of providing care to those with the disease.

In an interview with Charlotte Robinson, Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) discussed the specifics of America’s Affordable Health Care Choices Act.

Questions were submitted to Rep. Baldwin through The Huffington Post, allowing constituents to ask how the health care bill will affect them personally. Baldwin discussed the public option, the 50 million Americans who aren’t covered under health insurance, and how she plans on getting it through Congress.

The Huffington Post reports,

Charlotte Robinson: Do you support a single-payer plan?

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin: I have been a single-payer advocate for as long as I’ve had an opinion on health care, which goes back to my childhood — because that’s really how other countries have achieved universal health care. The most important element of the bill before us relating to single-payer is making sure that we have a very strong public option available among the choices that Americans will have, competing toe-to-toe with private health insurance to keep the private health insurance options honest. And, I have set as a bottom line the health care reform that we produce in the Congress must have a robust public plan.

CR:  As a member of Congress, will you have the same health care coverage as every other citizen once this bill takes effect?

TB: Let me describe how it is designed. A lot of the new choices and options are made specifically to be available for the 47 million people who have no insurance and for the many more who are under-insured or in small businesses that for example won’t be able to keep on providing health care because it’s gotten unaffordable and out of reach. And so the first phase of the bill sets up what we’re calling an “exchange.” I know it’s not a sexy name, but an exchange whereby someone who’s uninsured or under-insured or unhappily insured can come in and compare the plans and compare their prices and compare what they cover. And that’s precisely where this public option needs to be available as one of the choices to the people who will now be able to get health insurance; some of them for the first time in many, many years.

One thing I might note is the kind of health insurance that I have as a member of Congress. I participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefit plan. What that is, is a series of options and every year we have an open-enrollment period where every federal employee in the country and frankly across the globe, because we have Federal employees overseas too, receive a catalog and it shows and reviews the health care options, prices, what it covers, etc.

That’s exactly what we’re setting up right now for the uninsured and for the underinsured. So, this Exchange is very much like the system that’s available for federal employees or state employees across the nation. It will be a series of choices where you can compare benefits, compare prices and enroll in the program of your choice.

CR:  If the bill will not take effect for 4 years what will you tell the people who need help now?

TB: I have been in Congress ten and a half years and I ran for Congress so we could reform health care, so I could work on providing universal access. I get letters and I have conversations on a daily basis of what happens to people in our current system. People with pre-existing conditions who are being turned away and so can’t get any insurance at all because we don’t cover people who had cancer a decade ago or who had certain illnesses and so the pain is very, very real. I wish we could put together a bill that had a light switch attached to it so that as soon as it got signed by the President, we turn on the light and all of a sudden everybody would be able to enroll.

But as you can imagine when you’re setting up a new system in the first phases, probably 80-100 million people would be enrolled. That does take a little bit of time and it’s just a tragedy to me that there will be more heartbreak before this is set up. Frankly, that’s why we need to act with some sense of urgency. The longer we wait, the longer it will take for these options and choices to be available to American citizens.

For more of the interview, visit The Huffington Post.

To hear the full interview, including LGBT language added to the bill, visit OUTTAKE VOICES.

Federal health reform legislation moving through Congress could contain several pro-LGBT provisions, including the equalization of the tax treatment of domestic partner benefits offered by employers to their gay and lesbian employees, according to a report in the Advocate today.  Under current law, employees who take advantage of such benefits must pay federal income tax on their value, unlike married heterosexual couples whose family benefits are generally not subject to federal income taxes.

James Delaplane, a consultant working with the Human Rights Campaign on the issue, said there is a reasonable chance the provision could make it into the bill that goes to the president’s desk, assuming one does.  According to the Advocate:

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, the first and only openly lesbian Member of Congress, has introduced legislation that would fund federal research into sexual orientation and gender identity with an eye toward improving health care for the LGBT community.

In a press release today, Baldwin said:

“Our current health care system fails LGBT Americans on many levels. Although we have ample anecdotal evidence of these disparities, the federal government lacks even the most basic data on sexual orientation and gender identity and health.  This bill invests in research and takes critical steps towards improving the health of LGBT Americans and their families.”