Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits limiting healthcare coverage

With the enormous increase in the cost of healthcare, especially for catastrophic illnesses, employers have begun to modify their healthcare insurance plans to limit the amount of coverage an employee can receive for treatment of a particular illness, such as AIDS and its related illnesses. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, however, prohibits an employer from discriminating against disabled individuals with respect to healthcare benefits even if the employer's healthcare plan is not administered by the employer. Thus, it is important for healthcare providers to actively investigate healthcare claims prior to a patient's admission to a hospital to determine whether adequate coverage exists--and to what extent it exists--for treatment of the patient's illness and how and from whom the hospital will be compensated.