As we ride out another month of attacks on women's health care, let's take a moment to mark an important milestone. It was two years ago this week that President Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a significant step in fixing the country's broken health system.
ACA started a revolution that is decades overdue and represents one of the greatest advances for women's access to health care in a generation. It ensures that all new insurance plans cover preventive care for women -- including birth control, annual well woman exams, breast and cervical cancer screenings and immunizations -- without expensive co-pays or deductibles. It stops the discriminatory practice of charging women more than men for health insurance and ends practices such as denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions and dropping individuals after they become sick. It expands coverage for young adults by allowing them to stay on their parents' health plan until age 26. And by 2014, it will extend affordable health coverage to tens of millions of women and families who now lack it.
As the trusted health care provider to one in five women, Planned Parenthood hears from patients every day about the urgent need to improve access to affordable, preventive health care, especially from those who need it the most.
That's why Planned Parenthood supports ACA, and its multitude of health benefits to help women, men and families lead healthier lives. And that's why President Obama should be applauded for championing ACA.
Unfortunately, Mitt Romney, the leading Republican presidential candidate, is desperate to woo his party's most extreme elements, and pledges that he would "get rid of" ACA's health benefits if elected president. This is on top of his campaign promise to "get rid of" Planned Parenthood.
In other words, Mitt Romney wants to take a major step backwards on women's health, undermine access to preventive health care such as cancer screenings and birth control, take away protections against medical discrimination and allow insurance companies to charge women more for health care.
Mitt Romney's leading opponents in the Republican presidential primary, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, are just as retrograde in playing politics with women's health.
Take birth control. It's basic, preventive health care that virtually all women use at some point in their lives. That's why the highly respected, nonpartisan Institute of Medicine recommended that birth control be included among the preventive services that are covered with no additional co-pays.
For millions of women of all faiths and economic backgrounds, that provision alone could be a passport to healthier families, improved health outcomes and higher earnings.
Yet Mitt Romney not only wants to take away that benefit, he wants to go even further, and allow CEOs or health plans to refuse to cover any health care service they object to. That proposal is known as the Blunt Amendment, and it's so dangerous that a wide range of health care groups, including the American Cancer Society, the March of Dimes, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Spina Bifida Association, oppose it.
As Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich seem determined to learn the hard way, Americans aren't looking for a president to revoke women's rights and take away their health care. They're looking for a leader who wants to expand access to affordable care.
But in the Republican presidential candidates' vision of health care, they want to let CEOs and politicians decide which medical services a woman can receive from her doctor.
It's a far cry from what most Americans want. In a recent national poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 63 percent of respondents, including 60 percent of Catholics and 62 percent of political Independents, said they supported full coverage of birth control under health care reform.
So let's celebrate that women under the Affordable Care Act will at long last get equal access to health care. But let's also recommit ourselves to protecting women's health and protecting the new law.
Cecile Richards is president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
Follow Cecile Richards on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cecilerichards
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By equal access, I am assuming you mean equal to the access men have.
Lets see what the feds consider "equal."
Prior to health care reform there were two women's health offices federally authorized and protected by law: the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) at the National Institutes of Health, and the Office of Women's Services at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
After health care reform was signed, five other offices of womens health were given authorization and protection under federal law, residing in the following agencies: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Agency for Health care Research and Quality(AHRQ), the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
That makes seven offices on women's health within the federal government, compared to zero for the other half of the the adult population, men. As a tax payer, man or women, what about that is equal use of tax payer dollars?
Celebrate the good things for women in the ACA, sure lets do that. But, "as we ride out another month of attacks on women's health care," how about asking the question, "how much is enough?"
What's discriminatory about it? Apparently, Cecile didn't read this little paragraph in the article she links to:
"Insurers said they charged women more than men because claims showed that women ages 19 to 55 tended to use more health care services. They are more likely to visit doctors, to get regular checkups, to take prescription drugs and to have certain chronic illnesses."
That sounds like a cost of doing business. It's also called spreading the risk. Insurance 101.
More studies are beginning to prove that wellness care isn't cost effective due to over utilization. Sure, you may catch the big disease once in awhile, but it isn't enough to offset the difference in utilization.
As for birth control, it's a choice. It's not medically necessary, Ok sure, there are some folks out there that may have a hormonal imbalance or something, and in that case fine. But why am I being asked to pay for something I don't need, use or want?
-Regards
So yeah, insurers charge more for them. It's not random.
You want it? You pay for it!
We didn't get healthcare reform or anything like it. We were sold down the river to private industry who have proven they cannot be trusted to provide vital goods and services in exchange for a little regulation. Regulation didn't need an expensive public program to be instituted.
We can't let them do this to girls and women.
To these guys, a woman can ONLY be a baby oven, or the town pump.
I do agree that women should not pay more for health insurance, and that men should not pay more for life or auto insurance.
Are you saying that the good Jesuits have discovered a way to gestate a fetus in a male? Is that what "reproductive self-determination of men" means? If so, miracle time!!!!
I don't know why people don't get that Planned Parenthood is a health center, often situated in areas that are under-served by doctors and hospitals. PP treats women, men and children who need health care. They are primarily a reproductive healthcare center (treatment and education for birth control, STD's, cancer screenings), but will treat people who are not able to get treatment elsewhere.
Tne thing is, the health care act is about PRIVATE companies that are PAID by their customers cover things. It's not the government paying for it.
If you are outrage about men paying more for life insurance, even though they take more risks in general, then work toward changing that.
Women who are insured by the entity that they work for are charged the same rates as men so that leaves women who are or wish to be self insured paying higher costs for the expected higher cost of services of women during their child bearing years. I worked for a company where I was surprised that my rates were lower than my previous company and when I asked why I was told that since the company tended to employ younger workers they overall healthcare needs were less.
If ACA provides for women to receive “free” contraceptives, sterilizations and abortafacia drugs all in the name of equality, then why are they not providing men with “free” condoms, Viagra and vasectomies?
So explain again why I should pay for your birth control?
That's your job.
The cost of my gym membership keeps me healthy and therefore less of a burden to healthcare, right?
So, if you pay for my $80 a month gym fee, I will pay for your birth control....deal?
As far as the insurance companies are concerned, birth control is less expensive than pregnancy, birthing, abortions, and the medical conditions treated with birth control, so the insurance companies are happy with providing it as part of their services - at no cost, because girls and women will use it more if they don't have to pay out of pocket for it at the time of purchase. It's easier to keep them using BC that way.