Arthritis Today features comments from Dr. Eric Rackow about the impact of healthcare reform on people living with arthritis 

Arthritis Today - April 13, 2010 

Excerpt:
The new health-care reform legislation, signed into law late last month, introduces major changes to the current system that likely will affect many of the 46 million people with some form of arthritis.

Effective six months after the law's enactment, companies no longer will be able to impose such a limit. It's worth knowing that it can only take some major surgeries such as transplant operations to meet the lifetime cap, offers Eric Rackow, MD, president and CEO of SeniorBridge, a care management company that helps people with the challenges of complex chronic illness, such as arthritis.

"Let's say you have liver disease and need a liver transplant, you can use up your lifetime cap very quickly," he explains.

The same scenario could be true for someone with severe rheumatoid arthritis who has to take expensive biologic medications, he adds.

"Depending on your policy, [if] you had a severe exacerbation [of arthritis], you might exceed the limit in a year or over your lifetime," he says.

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