Final answer:
Under current law, after the passage of the ACA, medical plan late enrollees cannot be excluded for pre-existing conditions, effectively reducing the previous maximum exclusion period to zero.
Step-by-step explanation:
Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which was passed into law in 1996, there were provisions that allowed medical plans to exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions for new enrollees for certain periods.
However, after the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, the situation changed significantly.
The ACA, often referred to as Obamacare, prohibited insurance companies from rejecting people due to pre-existing medical conditions.
This means that under current law, medical plan late enrollees cannot be excluded from coverage for their pre-existing conditions at all, effectively reducing the maximum exclusion period to zero.
Furthermore, the ACA has significantly increased the accessibility of health insurance.
The percentage of uninsured Americans decreased from 20.3% in 2012 to 8.6% in 2020, underscoring the law's impact on providing health insurance for about 32 million uninsured Americans, including those not covered by their employers who can now buy coverage from state-based insurance exchanges.