Archive for the 'Reproductive Health' Category

Historic Milestone Reached! Bill Needs Improvement…

Published on December 24, 2009 in Debra Ness, Health Care, Reform and Reproductive Health. 1 Comment
Debra Ness

Debra Ness

Today, the Senate took a historic step to fix our nation’s broken health care system by passing comprehensive reform that will cover 31 million more people, prohibit insurance practices that undermine meaningful, affordable coverage, help contain costs, and put us on track to improve the quality and coordination of care.

But this flawed bill must be improved. The anti-choice provisions in the Senate and House bills are bad and worse, and represent a step the nation simply should not take.

It is a sad day when the price of reform is undermining access to a basic health service that America’s women need.

Those of us who spend our lives working to improve women’s health have been deeply shaken as lawmakers allowed reproductive health services to become a political bargaining chip, and as opponents of choice used reform to advance their extreme agenda.

Both the Senate and House bills contain anti-choice provisions that betray the promise of reform for women and would, in practical terms, cost millions of women coverage for basic reproductive health care. This should not stand.

We will work tirelessly to improve the final bill, including by urging conferees to provide more support to the low- and moderate-income families that will now have to purchase coverage.

We must strengthen the final bill by maintaining strong delivery and payment reforms, ensuring greater affordability and meaningful benefits, and guaranteeing effective market reforms that prohibit the discriminatory practices that have put affordable, quality health coverage out of reach for millions of women and families.

We see today’s vote, and the eventual enactment of this bill, as a beginning rather than an end.

The true test of reform’s success will depend on whether it delivers on the promise to expand access to high quality, affordable care; dramatically improves quality and care coordination; gives us better value for our health dollars; and puts us on track to get costs under control. We see implementation as key, and making our health care system work for the most vulnerable patients is essential.

And we look forward to the day when women’s health is no longer bargained away.

Our elected leaders’ work will not be done until those goals are achieved. And we will count on you to stand by our side.

It’s a resolution for the new year that we must all keep!

A Historic Moment…But at Women’s Expense

Published on November 10, 2009 in Debra Ness, Health Care and Reproductive Health. 0 Comments
Debra Ness

Debra Ness

The health reform bill the House passed this weekend had some long-overdue advances — and an eleventh hour amendment so appalling it taints the entire bill.

The U.S. House of Representatives brought the nation one huge step closer to giving all Americans access to high quality, affordable care. We’ve been fighting for decades to get here, and it was an historic moment.

But the outrageous, reckless, and unnecessary restriction on abortion coverage — added at the eleventh hour by opponents of women’s right to choose — threatens to undermine the promise of reform and endanger women’s health and lives. It simply must not stand.

The Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962) includes some real advances.   This bill’s greatest strengths include ending gender rating, limiting age rating and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions.  It is long past time for these disgraceful practices to end.  We are pleased that H.R. 3962 would extend these new federal rating rules to all individual and fully insured group markets.

The House bill also covers maternity care, well-woman and well-child visits, and cancer screening — and it includes no-cost language to let states expand access to Medicaid-covered family planning services without a cumbersome waiver process.�

We also applaud the provisions that will help lower-income families with the new obligation to buy health insurance, and support the expansion of the Medicaid national ‘floor’ to 150 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. But more must be done to ensure that affordable coverage is within reach for low- and moderate-income families.

But the inclusion of the Stupak-Pitts anti-choice amendment utterly taints this bill. Unless that amendment is removed, the promise of reform will ring hollow for women who will lose coverage for essential reproductive health care that we now have.

This is a historic opportunity that lawmakers must not squander by capitulating to the anti-choice extremists who would deny women coverage for basic reproductive health care.

Debunking Myths and Misinformation in the Health Reform Debate

Published on August 31, 2009 in Health Care, Judith Lichtman and Reproductive Health. 4 Comments
Judith L. Lichtman

Judith L. Lichtman

It is always a terrible shame when politics gets in the way of the imperative to meet the health care needs of women.

 

At the National Partnership, we remain fully committed to health care reform that guarantees universal access to high quality, affordable reproductive health services – including family planning, maternity care, and abortion. Despite the importance of these services to women, reproductive health has – predictably enough – emerged as a divisive issue in the ongoing health care reform debate.

Specifically, anti-choice politicians and advocacy groups have ramped up efforts to use health care reform as a vehicle to undermine access to abortion services, although much of what is being said about abortion coverage bears little relationship to the actual proposals being debated in Congress. In reality, abortion coverage is not mandated by any of the four bills that have been marked up in the House and Senate – despite high-pitched assertions to the contrary.

Three of the four bills considered by House and Senate Committees to date merely allow reproductive health services to be treated the same as all other primary care health care services – meaning that an advisory committee or the HHS secretary would make a determination about coverage. The more conservative House Energy and Commerce committee approved a bill which takes a dramatically different approach – one designed to reflect an abortion truce that maintains the status quo at best. The legislation passed by that Committee addresses abortion coverage most explicitly –­ and in fact makes clear that abortion services cannot be included in the “essential benefits package” that plans would be required to offer.

The Energy and Commerce Committee legislative language clearly states that health plans participating in exchange are neither prohibited nor required to include abortion coverage. Instead, the Committee language is designed to allow women to retain the type of coverage they currently have. Consistent with current practice in the private health insurance market, the amendment authored by Representative Lois Capps (D-CA) would allow – not require – insurers to sell policies to individuals and some small businesses through a national insurance exchange that include abortion coverage.

The Capps language also addresses concerns that plans participating in the exchange that receive federal dollars not use those government funds to pay for coverage of abortion services by requiring that coverage for any abortion services provided for reasons other than those allowed under the Hyde amendment (rape, incest or danger to the woman’s life) be paid for out of private premiums. Under the Capps language, both public and private plans could cover abortion services – but with private dollars. In addition, the Capps amendment would not pre-empt state laws regulating abortion and restrictions on state Medicaid coverage of abortion would continue – meaning that the federal funds could not be used to provide abortion services except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the woman’s life.

It is always a terrible shame when politics gets in the way of the imperative to meet the health care needs of women. For women, reproductive health services are basic health services, and lawmakers should remember that. Efforts to limit coverage of abortion services are really attempts to deny women access to health care services that are legal, necessary, and that one-third of American women will need during the course of their reproductive lives.