Posts Tagged ‘health care reform’

As you are undoubtedly aware, the health care reform bill recently passed the House of Representatives. While the Senate still has to concur on some aspects of the bill due to the reconciliation process, we can be assured that, at the very least, the core tenets of the legislation will soon be signed into law by President Obama.

There’s been a lot of chatter about what this bill will and won’t do. About what had to be removed and added. And about the compromises that were made to insure the passage of reform.

I am a big proponent of universal health care, as I believe that every person should be able to afford to get sick and that no one should be denied access to health care for any reason. So the lack of any sort of universal plan or public option is disappointing to me. I identify as a member of the LGBT community, so the fact that provisions that were designed to help lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (”banning discrimination against LGBT people, the Early Treatment for HIV Act, ending taxation of domestic-partner health insurance, and launching a program to study LGBT health and discrimination”) were stripped out of the bill is upsetting to me. And as someone who has worked for Planned Parenthood for a number of years, and believes quite strongly in a woman’s right to choose, I’m incredibly saddened by the deal that President Obama and the Democratic leadership struck with Rep. Bart Stupak and other conservative Democrats in order to gain their votes for the bill. Agreeing to an executive order re-affirming the ban on using federal funds for abortions (after strongly opposing the Hyde amendment previously) is shameless political maneuvering at its best and outright hypocrisy at its worst.

But…

I seem to have a lot of friends who are outraged for the above reasons, and whose perception of this legislation is completely clouded by the fact that it’s not everything that everyone hoped for. But politics rarely, if ever, works that way.

The fact of the matter is that it seems unlikely that the bill would have passed without those maneuvers and compromises. And what we can say today (that we couldn’t say a week ago) is that 32 million more people will have health insurance in this country. And that’s a pretty incredible thing. Yes, the abortion aspect is troubling, for many reasons. But I don’t think that the Democrats completely threw women under the bus, as they’ve been accused. Because the fact is that this bill is going to give a lot of women access to things they couldn’t afford before. Pap smears, birth control consultations, colposcopies, STI testing… these are major components of women’s health care and, all of a sudden, more and more women will have access to them. And that, in my opinion, is quite something.

As I said, I understand the nature of the disappointment. But things are better today than they were yesterday. It’s progress. And we should enjoy it, while keeping in mind that this is a start, not a finish. So take a moment and celebrate the achievement… and then let’s get back to work to make health care even better.

In case you missed the bipartisan Health Care Reform Summit yesterday, coverage of the six hour event made it seem that the Summit lived down to low expectations. You have to respect President Obama for trying and at least the conversation was civil. Still, it’s pretty difficult to see room for much progress to be made. This lack of progress has never been more evident than in women’s access to reproductive health care under the proposed legislation.

We recently learned that the President has joined Congress (including Congressional allies) in putting Women’s Health at stake in the name of Health Care Reform. President Obama’s Health Care Reform proposal accepts the Nelson Check Provision which contains extremely restrictive language around abortion from the Senate version of the bill which passed that chamber back in December.

See our post on the Nelson Provision for the details but, in a nutshell, the “Nelson Abortion Check Provision” effectively creates an abortion rider system where all individuals who purchase their health care coverage will be forced to write two premiums checks—one for their abortion coverage and one for everything else. This includes coverage of any abortion that is medically necessary.

Basically, if you want abortion coverage, the Nelson provision requires you pay for it separately from all other components of your health care coverage.

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In the midst of holiday travels and last-minute gift buying it was easy to miss the latest devastating blow to women’s health in the US Senate. It came late the Saturday before Christmas when the “Nelson Check Provision” was added to the Senate version of the Health Care Reform bill.

You’ll remember Senator Ben Nelson (D- Nebraska) from his sponsorship of the anti-choice amendment to the Senate bill that contained the same restrictive abortion language as the Stupak Amendment in the House. Nelson’s amendment failed to pass the Senate but that did not stop him from continuing his quest to litigate abortion and restrict reproductive health care access in the Health Care Reform bill.

Nelson basically held his Democratic colleagues hostage for several weeks of December refusing to complete the 60 vote filibuster-proof majority unless restrictive and damaging abortion language was added to the health care bill. In the end, Senate leadership was forced to agree to his demands given the choice between passing a bill or not.

Nelson ended up with fiscal perks for the state of Nebraska written into the bill (the tab will be picked up by the tax-payers of the 49 other states) asa well as what he wanted all along—a provision that creates an unworkable system for women seeking to have abortion care included as part of their health care coverage.

The “Nelson Abortion Check Provision” effectively creates an abortion rider system because individuals purchasing their health care coverage will be forced to write two premiums checks—one for their abortion coverage and one for everything else. This includes coverage of any abortion that is medically necessary. If you want abortion coverage, the Nelson provision requires you pay for it separately from all other components of your health care coverage.

It’s not hard to envision how this will end up playing out. First, women will not choose plans that include abortion coverage because they have to pay for that coverage separately and who plans an unplanned pregnancy? Second, the complicated system the Nelson provision puts in place will create such an administrative burden for insurances that it is likely that many of them will stop offering abortion coverage at all.

So where does this leave us? The Nelson provision goes way beyond any restrictions in the current insurance marketplace today and imposes significant obstacles for women attempting to access comprehensive reproductive health care coverage.

Due to the unworkable and system set up by the Nelson provision and the fact that the Stupak Amendment that passed in House bill is even more restrictive of abortion coverage, Planned Parenthood has been forced to oppose the Health Care Reform bill currently under consideration.

In spite of all the blows women’s health has taken over the past two months, there is still hope that Congressional leaders can find a more workable compromise in the final bill that will come out of conference committee early next year. Please contact Senator Kay Hagan at (202) 224-6342 and ask her to let Senate leadership know that she does NOT want restrictive abortion language in the final bill and that she will vote for reform without it included. While you’re at it, contact your US Congress member and deliver the same message! You can find out who represents you by entering your zip code here: http://www.house.gov/zip/ZIP2Rep.html