Fighting For Healthcare!

On Saturday, I had the privilege of representing NOW at the Healthcare Rally in uptown Charlotte. This is an excerpt of that speech.

"Senate Republican leaders unveiled their health-care bill Thursday morning, after weeks of crafting it behind closed doors. The bill, like the House’s, makes steep spending cuts to Medicaid and insurance subsidies, and uses the savings to fund substantial tax cuts for the health-care industry and wealthier Americans. The subsidy cuts fall disproportionately on lower-income and older Americans. Those who live in rural areas, where health-care costs tend to be higher, also stand to pay higher premiums according to analyses by the Kaiser Family Foundation.”  Women and especially women who are not wealthy will be the hardest hit. That should not be surprising since the bill was crafted behind closed doors by 13 wealthy white men. 

The Senate’s new healthcare bill makes it more expensive to be a woman.  If enacted, this legislation will turn back the clock on women’s health care. The bill introduced Thursday defunds many women’s vital health care needs and increases the cost astronomically on others. It defunds Planned Parenthood which provides family planning, birth control and health care for millions of low income women. That means fewer women will have any access to any kind of birth control.   

The bill allows states to redefine what counts as an Essential Health Benefit for Medicaid plans.  Currently, all plans must cover 10 categories of care. These include many women-focused services like maternity care, newborn care, contraception, mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, well woman visits, domestic violence screening and counseling, prescription drug coverage and mental health. The bill allows states to require that new mothers, starting October 2017, return to work within 60 days after giving birth or lose their coverage. This will affect young mothers who need to be home with their newborn and Medicaid will certainly give them no help with childcare to enable them to return to work. Medicaid cuts will affect women in other ways. Seventy five million Americans depend on Medicaid and 70% of these are adult women. 70% of people in nursing homes are women and 80% of these women in nursing homes are on Medicaid.

If that’s not enough, it’s possible that ALL women in the individual market as well as women who have employee provided insurance could also lose those protections, not just women on Medicaid. Again, the bill allows states broad waiver authority in what services are covered by insurance plans and again allows them to redefine the Essential Health Benefits for women. If states are able to redefine these, it is most likely maternity and newborn coverage that’s on the line. The Congressional Budget Office says women could end up paying as much as $1,000 a month for an additional rider that covers maternity care and pregnancy on top of their premiums and other health care costs. It prohibits tax subsidies from paying for any individual market plan that covers abortion. In other words, it is going to make it much harder to avoid a pregnancy and it’s going to make it harder to take care of that baby when the baby arrives. The United States already has the highest maternal mortality rate and the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized nation in the world and reducing coverage will only make the problem worse.

In addition, although the plan bans insurance companies from refusing care based on pre-existing conditions, the rates for people with pre-existing conditions may be astronomically unaffordable and there can be life time caps of what the insurance company will pay.  Less expensive bare bones plans may not cover all of the medical services the person needs requiring more out of pocket expenses.

Now is the time to get behind a single payer Medicare for All healthcare plan. Healthcare is not a privilege only for the wealthy and women deserve the full range of healthcare services that women need.  Denying people affordable health care is immoral. A single payer plan is the morally right thing to do and the fiscally responsible thing to do.  We must defeat the Republican healthcare plans now and support Medicare for ALL.

(Research for this article is based on readings from Avalere Health, Kaiser Family Foundation, National Information Center on Health Services, Research and Technology NICHSR and Physicians for a National Health Program PNHP)