Women’s Health and Health Care Reform

Women have much at stake in the debates over health care reform at the state and national levels in the United States. The current American health care “system” is failing to provide access to needed care for many of these women and for the family members whose health care they often coordinate. The reasons are complex, involving issues of coverage eligibility and limitations, cost, health care disparities, family dynamics and the willingness of health care institutions and individual health professionals to provide requested services:

• Nearly one in every five non-elderly1 women in the United States has no health insurance coverage.
• Another 10 percent of non-elderly women depend on public health insurance that often lacks comprehensive coverage for women’s health care.2
• Those women who do have private health insurance are often at risk of losing it, such as the loss of dependent coverage through divorce.
• Private health insurance has coverage limitations and employees face increasing shares of the premium costs, as well as higher co-pays and deductibles that can make using their insurance difficult.
• Even when women do have health insurance coverage, they have no guarantee that their local hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and doctors’ offices will provide the reproductive health care they need.
• When it comes to the health of family members, women play key roles in medical decision-making, and in arranging for or personally providing care.

To address these issues MergerWatch, along with the Avery Institute for Social Change and the National Women’s Health Network have started a project, Raising Women’s Voices for the Health Care We Need. The project’s goal is to ensure that women’s perspectives about their health care needs and those of their families can be powerfully articulated, genuinely considered and incorporated into health care reform plans.