Everyone wants their family to be healthy. And a key component of this is ensuring that mothers, daughters, and sisters have access to the preventive services they need. When it comes to health, women are often the sole decision maker for their families and the trusted source in circles of friends -- and they are also key consumers of health care.
Women have unique healthcare needs across their life span and have high rates of chronic disease, including diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Yet while women are more likely to need preventive health care services, they often have less ability to pay. Too often, the combination of women's lower incomes and out-of-pocket health costs mean that women forgo necessary preventive services. But removing cost sharing requirements improves women's access to important preventive services. In fact, one study found that the rate of women getting a mammogram went up as much as 9 percent when cost sharing was removed.
The Affordable Care Act helps make prevention affordable and accessible for all Americans by requiring new health plans to cover recommended preventive services and by eliminating cost sharing, such as deductibles, copayments or co-insurance, for many preventive services. The law also requires insurance companies to cover additional preventive health benefits for women.
For the first time ever, HHS is adopting a new comprehensive set of guidelines for women's preventive services that builds on and fills the gaps in existing preventive services recommendations for women's health. Together, these guidelines will help ensure that women stay healthy at every stage of life.
The new guidelines include a number of key services for women. For adult women of all ages, well-woman visits will now be covered without cost-sharing. Similar to well-baby visits and the annual Medicare wellness visit, this annual well-woman preventive care visit will help women and their doctors determine what preventive services are appropriate and set up a plan to help women get the care they need to be healthy.
Women will have access to life-saving screenings. For example, women will have access to screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic violence. An estimated 25 percent of women in the U.S. report being targets of intimate partner violence during their lifetimes. Screening is effective in the early detection and effectiveness of interventions to increase the safety of abused women.
Sexually-active women will have access to annual counseling on sexually transmitted infections and HIV. Only 28 percent of women aged 18 to 44 years reported that they had discussed STIs with a doctor or nurse yet screening services have been shown to reduce risky behavior. Women who are 30 years old or older will have access to high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA testing every three years, regardless of pap smear results. Early screening, detection and treatment have been shown to help reduce the prevalence of cervical cancer.
Women will also have access to all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling. Though most workers in employer-sponsored plans are currently covered for contraceptives, these new guidelines offer more women the opportunity to access these important services. When half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, we know family planning services are an essential preventive service for women. These services are critical to appropriately spacing and ensuring intended pregnancies which results in improved maternal health and better birth outcomes.
For mothers-to-be, gestational diabetes screening will now be covered at no out of pocket expense. It will help improve the health of mothers and babies because women who have gestational diabetes have an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the future. Pregnant and postpartum women will have access to comprehensive lactation support and counseling from trained providers, as well as breastfeeding equipment. One of the barriers for breastfeeding is the cost of purchasing or renting breast pumps and nursing related supplies, and now, women will have coverage for this important benefit. As breastfeeding is one of the most effective preventive measures mothers can take to protect their health and the health of their children, access to this equipment without cost can help improve maternal and child health.
By eliminating barriers like co-pays, these guidelines will help improve access to affordable, quality health care for all women. New private health plans must cover the guidelines on women's preventive services with no cost sharing in plan years starting on or after July 29, 2012. Today, we are moving one step closer to knocking down the barriers to the services that keep American women healthy.
Elizabeth Lee Ford-Jones, MD: Our Health System Is Failing Our Children
Kristin Kirkpatrick, M.S., R.D., L.D.: How To Tweak Your Health Routine For Your Age
Michael Roizen, M.D.: A Three-Step Plan To Lowering Health Care Costs
Gina Ciagne, CLC: It's Official: August Is National Breastfeeding Month
"Should I be Tested for Cancer: Maybe Not, and Here's Why" by H. Gilbert Welch. Gives perspective on screening, and what works. As resources become constrained, we need to understand why these decisions are mad. The process should not be politicized.
One could then suppose that Men also have unique health needs.
For instance, Prostate Cancer, which strikes more often than Breast Cancer and kills nearly as many, gets less than 50% as much research funding.
How about addressing that, Madam Secretary?
And lo and behold, "conditions" that a woman may contract, such as pregnancy etc., seem to be considered non-medical most of the time and by choice. Even though the insurance will pay for it, the wording makes it clear, insurance companies, may not hate women for being women, but they damn near come close.
That they have an easier time getting away with denying coverage to women, especially regarding anything related to sex, highlights societal values in need of change. In the same way that you can look at lice rates to get a sense of poverty rates, you can look at where health care is denied to get a sense of lapses in values.
There is absolutely no moral justification to require your neighbor to buy you desirable but non the less elective (e.g breast pumps) devices and services. For anyone who thinks this is a good idea I would require them to first go to their neighbor and ask for money for lactation support because that is the moral equivalent of what this program does-except it hides behind agency rule making. In other words its not free-your neighbor is paying for it.
However, even if you think its morally good to redistribute money, this is an economic disaster. The most efficient way to redistribute money is to transfer it directly to the poor and then let them decide what products they want to buy. This way decision making is kept in the hands of the consumer. If you want to argue that some people are too ignorant to buy the "right" things then you are basically advocating a command and control totalitarian society where leaders will decide what's good for us.
Which leads to the final point-this proposal is being propagated by a largely unaccountable agency. These rules were not voted on by Congress and Secretary Sebelius (although approved by Congress) was never voted on by the people and is virtually unremovable. Government by agency is highly unaccountable.
no, but we SHOULD pay for men's health in the exact same way that we pay for the coddled american female, even as sebelius and other women, like the man-hating obama continue to provide them, and only them, with EVERYTHING and ANYTHING; demand NO responsibility and do NOTHING for men's MANY needs. DISGUSTING.
the conservative solution: stop paying for the man's Viagra
though, I do want to acknowledge 'fec's argument that Viagra treats a medical condition, whereas birth control pills to avoid pregnancy do not.
After all, they wouldn't want to drop their numbers and enforce their own rules , would they ?