Before ACA, insurance had a more traditional "insurancey" role by excluding pre-existing conditions (aka managing moral hazard) in order to make money via premiums. In the "guaranteed issue" world post-ACA, insurance companies have pivoted instead to extracting as much money as they can from an increasingly vertically integrated ecosystem (PBMs etc)
You have the two mixed up. Insurance companies - even for group insurance like through your company where they always had to accept everyone - required you to have “continuing coverage” and not have gaps or you had waiting periods.
The ACA also was written to enforce that through mandates and subsidies - a carrot and stick approach. The moral hazard was caused once there weren’t any mandates because of lawsuits by Republicans and the insurance companies still had to accept everyone.
We are talking past each other. When I said moral hazard I'm talking about adverse selection(1), my bad if that was unclear. And I was responding to some comments about denial for pre-existing conditions, which as you point out is irrelevant for continuous coverage group policies. Removing the mandate penalty without also adjusting the pre-existing condition protections did introduce adverse selection in the current regime. None of that disqualifies my argument about the current state of affairs though re the business model of modern insurance companies
If you were just looking to shout "dems good GOP bad" and find others who agree with you, that's cool too.
Before ACA, insurance had a more traditional "dump you when you were in need" role that leveraged pre-existing conditions rules by, if you fell ill in a way which was likely to be sufficiently expensive to make this profitable, looking for any minimally tenable evidence of an undisclosed pre-existing condition (just to have something to cite as a pretext, it didn't need to be convincing), using it to justify cancelling your insurance, and avoiding any legal remedy by refunding your entire lifetime of premium payments.
Of course, whether or not you actually had a pre-existing condition when you had signed up for the original insurance, you now have one that prevents you from getting new insurance,
The problem here is that pre-ACA you didn't have insurance, either.
Yes, they would (maybe--some plans saw huge sticker shock because the original didn't actually pay much of anything) sell you "insurance". They would offer a plan for a few years, then close it, offer something new. The old plan would see patients getting sick, costs would rise. Premiums were based on costs *for that plan*. Soon the healthy jump ship for something else, now the old plan is only the sick and the premiums go into a death spiral.
Thus the reality was that any ongoing problem soon you were uninsured.
