Stay Well, Raise Hell

Healthcare isn’t just a political football—it’s essential to our physical, emotional, and economic well-being.Now is the time for each and every one of us to take a stand and defend that basic right.

- Peg Rosen

WOMEN HAVE DIFFERENT healthcare needs from men. You know this, but just for the record: Almost four million of us gave birth in 2015; this year, more than 300,000 will be diagnosed with breast cancer. We’re more likely to have multiple chronic health conditions; one in four women has experienced violence by an intimate partner. That’s just for starters.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare), while imperfect, was a boon for women’s healthcare coverage. “Many people don’t realize that it’s because of the ACA that they can get mammograms or well checkups at no cost,” says Alina Salganicoff, director of women’s health policy at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “The ACA stopped insurers from charging women higher premiums on the individual market or denying them coverage.”

Of course, change is now afoot. Yet healthcare should be a nonpartisan issue. That’s why we need to let decision-makers know that no matter what new or revamped health plan they support, there are certain demands from which we cannot back down.

1 / MUST HAVE:

Coverage without consideration for gender

Before the ACA, insurers in some states could reject previously uninsured women for having preexisting health “conditions,” including a current pregnancy, a previous C-section, and—unbelievably—treatment for rape and a history of domestic abuse.

Even without so-called preexisting issues, women got a raw deal. A 2012 study by the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., found that nearly one-third of individual insurance plans charged women at least 30 percent more than men for coverage—“even when their plans didn’t include maternity coverage,” says NWLC’s Gretchen Borchelt.