The Broken Link: Braidwood, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), and the Health Equity Implications of Losing Free Access to Preventive Care

By Elizabeth Kaplan and Anu Dairkee. Originally published in the American Journal of Law and Medicine on December 30, 2024.

Braidwood Management, Inc. v. Becerra threatens the nationwide enforceability of the preventive care mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with respect to a variety of preventive health care services. The success of this lawsuit could have devastating repercussions. Not only would many current guidelines of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) be affected, but future preventive care recommendations would be as well, to the detriment of achieving health equity goals. 

This Article posits that the loss of guaranteed free preventive care could threaten current and future health equity gains. If preventive care is no longer offered without cost-sharing, research shows that many people, especially those with lower socioeconomic status, will not access the care.

This decrease in access to recommended screenings and other preventive services would likely decrease uptake, over time impacting the stage at which diseases such as cancer are diagnosed, making late-stage diagnoses with poorer prognoses more common, and increasing transmission of other conditions such as HIV. At the population level, decreased access to free preventive care could hinder efforts to reduce entrenched inequalities associated with these conditions.

Read the full article here.