This week is National Women's Health Week, a time to talk about and promote women's health. This year, we can truly be thankful for a health system that provides better, more affordable care to all Americans -- especially the women that spend so much of their time caring for the health and well being of others.
Women often serve as caregivers for their families, putting the needs of their spouses, children, and parents before their own. We encourage our family to eat their vegetables and get enough exercise. And as our parents get older, we make sure they fill their prescriptions.
Young, old, with private insurance, or with Medicare, the health care law signed into law last year, the Affordable Care Act, does more to advance women's health than we've seen in decades. It gives women more control over their health care and more security through all stages of their life.
Mothers can breathe a sigh of relief because children can no longer be denied health coverage due to pre-existing conditions. The law also requires new health plans to cover recommended preventive services, including vaccinations, and regular well-baby and well-child visits without cost-sharing or a deductible. And young women under the age of 26 who don't get insurance from their jobs now have the option of staying on their parent's family plan - giving young women more flexibility after graduating.
Many women are now guaranteed the ability to choose their doctors and visit their OB-GYNs without a referral. And, women are also no longer going to have to put off important screenings because recommended preventive services like mammograms, flu shots, and breast cancer screenings are available at no out-of-pocket cost in many plans.
As the majority of Medicare beneficiaries, women have a vested interest in the strength and longevity of the Medicare program. The Affordable Care Act strengthens Medicare by ensuring people on Medicare have access to preventive care through cost-free preventive screenings and by closing the coverage gap known as the "donut hole." In fact, nearly 4 million people with Medicare received cost relief during the law's first year. And today, seniors in the donut hole are offered a 50% discount on covered brand named drugs.
What's more, starting in 2014 when the law is fully implemented, it makes it illegal to charge women extra for health insurance in most cases. In other words, being a woman will no longer be a pre-existing condition. Also coming in 2014 is the requirement that insurance plans cover essential health benefits including newborn care and maternity care, and a new tax credit that will make health insurance affordable for all families.
With the health care law, we're putting women back in control of their health care and wellness and we are beginning to see a better future emerge. We're working with doctors and hospitals to keep patients healthier and improve the quality and safety of care. Across the country, there are children who no longer have to choose between having health benefits and their dream job, moms who don't have to worry about their children being rejected from health insurance coverage due to pre-existing conditions, and grandmothers who won't have to skip prescriptions in order to pay their rent.
This National Women's Health Week, we're reminded that it is our shared responsibility to help the important women in our lives get the care they need to stay healthy.
To learn more about women's health, visit www.HealthCare.gov. Go here to learn more about National Women's Health Week .
So let's be honest here, the FACT is that women consume more health care over the course of a lifetime then men do . . . yet the Government now says you can't charge them more because the consume more why?
There is a reason young men are charged more for car insurance, it's because they are a bigger risk and cost more money . . . same thing here.
What you see happening today is what would be the case for the next decades, without the Affordable Care Act, and what will soon end thanks to "Obamacare(s)".
Forcing women to purchase overpriced insurance from a bankrupt HMO corporate monopoly system is worse nightmare she, or anyone for that matter will ever face.
The HMO corporate monopoly system is what needs to be broken up, to bring costs down and if the insurance lobbiests are too powerfull to overcome, then government is supposed compete directly.
Government can compete directly against the HMO's by creating single-payer or at least a public option; Blue Cross and Cigna to scramble, like crazy, to bring costs down to maintain a profit.
What you have now, is this notion that no matter what Blue Cross or Cigna charges, or is 'immune' to not cover, the consumer can't do a darn thing about it and hope that their income increases.
Advocate say: "...well there's a tax subsidy if it's so expensive", however, what good does it do to someone flipping burgers at McDonald's who's income couldn't cover the burgers she's flipping.
The Obama/Romney health-care law should prove once-n-for-all, that a Wall Street, corporate HMO monopoly bailout/purchase/subsidy approach to medical treatment makes no sense whatsoever.
If it was politicly impossible to get one of those 2-items through, then it would've been better to have done nothing at all and let the bankrupt HMO system fail in collapse.
Now, all you have is a permanent bail out of a, still, bankrupt HMO system.
It's just like TARP bail outs, that created TBTF...never ending taxpayer's guarantee that everyone will always eat derivatives losses by Wall Street.
The best antidote for corporate monopolies is to allow them to FAIL!!!!!
Create a new health-care system from scratch.
Create a new banking-system from scratch.
This 'law' saves the rich owners of the bankrupt HMO system not the patients
Single-payer and so-called public option aren't the only choices to solve the insurance nightmare, I don't even think they're best. Many advanced nations have universal, lower-cost care (with better outcomes overall) within private for-profit deliver, with private insurers. Some of those countries have greater usage of healthcare and high-tech healthcare. Others have more lifestyle challenges such as smoking.
The one big difference is their health INSURANCE -- healthcare financing -- is NON-profit. We are the only advanced nation left to have for-profit healthcare FINANCING. We are, not coincidentally, also the only advanced nation without universal coverage, and with such high costs.
Other nations have accomplished what we want by simply taking profit out of healthcare FINANCING. This leaves healthcare DELIVERY largely unchanged, so there are no great jolts to the system (except that doctors no longer have to spend up to a third of their time dealing with insurance companies, and as a nation we would no longer have to spend $450 billion every year on insurance administration).
Switzerland tried allowing their powerful insurers to profit, costs skyrocketed, people began going bankrupt. So they voted it out, skyrocketing problems stopped. Swiss for-profit insurance run healthcare like charities, using their performance as a kind of advertising for their other for-profit insurance. Suddenly, the incentives align. In our system, insurers have no incentive to keep the cost of the SYSTEM down, just to control it to maximize profit-taking (hence$450billionpaperworkcosts).
People are not going to risk reverting to a system that allows discrimination based on your health history. That singular issue will cause a LOT of people to reaccess whethere they really want to vote against something that may ultimately SAVE THEIR LIFE.
Well, not all families. Those who don't qualify for premium subsidies are out in the cold. But it's individuals without families that will be hit the hardest, especially those under age 30.
Premium subsidies are graduated based not only on income, but also age. The older you are the greater the subsidy. Consider that most wealth in America is held by those age 55 plus and the only conclusion we can draw is that the PPACA premium subsidies amount to regressive wealth redistribution.
Age 26 is not age 30. Only a select few have access to a group policy. Then consider even if they do, most group plans require an employee contribution for dependents, often 100% of the dependent premium. The average premium for child dependents accounts for about 2.5 kids so if there is only one child on, the parents, assuming they have a contribution, are paying way more than they should.
So you may not like this kind of HC policy, but you certainly can't say that we'll have a problem paying for it, as exactly the opposite is true: it will help us pay LESS.
Sorry but that leaves out a huge percentage women and children who have no insurance. Also men in a similar situation. All of whom should be the main targets of any health care reform. And they are not.
That was and is why so many Americans supported Obama. Because of his initial promise of universal health care.
That is why so many who voted for him have chosen to reserve their support, we were betrayed.
The ACA gives coverage to 30 million more Americans. True, that still leaves 20 million Americans without coverage.
But it do is the first bill in more than half a century to change the equation and makes us come MUCH closer to universal health care than we've ever been.
What people who nevertheless think that these results are "disappointing" imo should try to understand is that CONGRESS, not the president, has the legal power to write and pass bills.
If we want those last 20 million to be covered too, we won't only need a president who supports universal health care, we also need a 60+ majority in Congress to support it. Which wasn't the case this time ..
1. by eliminating waste in the system
2. by incrreases taxes on the 5% wealthiest Americans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevacizumab
The FDA has been around for 100 years and has absolutely nothing to do with Obama's health reforms. It is the same agency that kept Thalidomide off the market in the USA and its job is to assure safety. Learn something before you spout off!
It would be the most shameful of all acts if the US Government decided to sacrifice millions of uninsured and under-insured American citizens just so insurance companies can keep their historical profits.
How exactly do you suggest we do this? You seem to imply the government should do it "... if the US government decided to sacrifice millions of uninsured..."
Don't you think eliminating government mandates that insurance cover everything, that only government approved companies may provide medical insurance (i.e. government sponsored cartels in each state) and allowing the free enterprise system to work (where companies compete for your business, rather than competing with each other for government bureaucrat approval) would reduce the "obscene profits"?
Nothing punishes companies more than competition in the free enterprise system. Nothing ensures their profits as much as government backing.
In case you didn't get the memo, we KNOW that the free market BS didn't work. ( Well it DID work well for the richest of the rich Americans )
Insurance companies get their obscene profits from this free market BS. If it worked so well we wouldn't be having this conversation and we would have an obscenely unsustainably expensive health care system that only the rich can afford. Insurance companies don't have competition and they blew their chance to get it right.
Obama has tried to address the problem and it will take a long time to get it right. But make no mistake, it will get better. Insurance companies will force themselves out by being greedy and stubborn.
And also, in case you didn't get the memo, Medicare (a Government run NON-PROFIT health care system ) is the most successful and loved health care system in the world.
Tell that to women who have been denied medications and treatments by insurance companies who depend on journals, FDA reports and other documentation rather than on doctor's orders.
Verification: http://visiontoamerica.org/story/obamacare-death-panels-first-murder.html#
I suggest they've removed it from approval because they don't way to pay for it. They've made the decision for you, after all, they control the industry to the extent that they force you to buy their products besides deciding what may be sold, who may sell, and in many cases who may buy.