Posts Tagged ‘health care reform’

Groundhog Day. I can’t imagine a more fitting day to watch the shenanigans sure to be on display in the NC House today.

I’m not talking weather forecast—six more weeks of winter or early spring. I’m talking Groundhog Day, the movie, the endless recycling of the past over and over again.  

The new majority in the NC House is taking up HB 2 (a.k.a. a bill to undermine the Affordability Care Act or Obama’s health care reform). The NC bill has had one committee hearing where the Republican chair refused to allow public comment, expert testimony or provide an official fiscal note so that members would know how much this effort will cost taxpayers.

HB 2 requires Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper to join other conservative states in suing the federal government over the Affordability Care Act. When Democratic Representative Grier Martin asked to hear from the AG’s office, he was soundly told no, it’s unnecessary.

Polling shows that North Carolinians are mixed on health care reform, which makes total sense. People want what they want but they don’t want to pay for it. People want to do away with preexisting conditions. Parents want to cover their children until they reach 26 years of age. No one wants lifetime caps. And, free preventive health care is wildly popular.

But to have all these things, we’ve got to join together to drive down the cost. Enter the mandate that everyone be insured. In order to keep cost down, the insurance pool must be comprised of healthy and sick people. So we pay more while we are healthy but we benefit when, inevitably, we need more health care—and, insurers won’t be able to deny us because we’re sick Oh so simple.

Of course, the new majority knows all these things but their end game is rehashing yesterday’s battles. And, why not? The Tea Party was borne of the vitriol spewed during the disastrous town hall fights over health care reform in 2009. Nothing like fomenting the base to stay in control.  

So stay tuned. I’m fairly certain dismantling health care reform won’t be the new majority’s only bill that takes us back in time.

Unfortunately, this seems to be common theme on both the National and State level.  Republicans ran on fiscal issues, but now that they’ve taken office, their focus is squarely on social issues. 
Check out this great video produced by Planned Parenthood:

And this excellent piece on the beginning of the NC Legislature by WRAL Capital Bureau Chief, Laura Leslie. 

“Despite all the talk leading up to the new session about how closing the projected $3.7 billion deficit would be the top priority for lawmakers this year, plenty of non-fiscal issues are being addressed by the initial bills being filed.”

As we said last week, Thom (Speaker Thom Tillis) should focus on the needs of the people, not denying people healthcare.  If you agree and want to help us, please consider contributing to our PAC.  We’ll be fighting to restore a pro-choice majority in 2012 and we’ll need your help.

I’ve never been enamored of the label “progressive.” I identify proudly as a liberal. But I do claim being part of a larger movement that supports policies and programs that take us, as a community, state and nation forward. Progressives and liberals can rightly claim the establishment of Minimum Wage, overtime, the Women’s Suffrage Amendment, Social Security, school lunches, 40 hour work weeks (creating weekends!), and the Family Medical Leave. Last year, after a contentious battle, we added health care reform to our lengthy list of accomplishments.

So what do you call people whose primary objective is to take us backwards? Looks like, we’ll be calling them the “new majority,” at least in the US House and NC General Assembly works. Both bodies have promised to repeal, dismantle or seriously imperil last year’s health care victory.

Let’s be clear. The Health Care Affordability Act wasn’t perfect but it did and will take us forward in ensuring that millions more have health care coverage they need and millions of others have protections they want—no lifetime limits or pre-existing conditions, being able to cover your kids until they’re 26 years of age. Most of us have thought about or wished for these protections at some point in our lives.

Safety-net protections and pretty much anything starting with “public” is what largely distinguishes our nation from lesser developed countries. We kid ourselves when we say our greatness has to do with our singular ingenuity or drive.

I can’t imagine a greater entrepreneurial spirit than the one on display in the poverty stricken barrios where I used to work in Santo Domingo.  There was no lack of ambition, only a reliable infrastructure on which to build an economy that would benefit most citizens not just an elite few. What most starkly separates our country from the “third world”  is our safety net–public education, potable water and environmental regulations that protect our long term health to name a few.

But we don’t need to indict lesser developed countries to understand how much our nation needs a stronger, more accessible health care system. At present, before health care reform has a chance to take place, a record number of Americans are uninsured.

We lead the industrialized world in unintended pregnancies and teenage pregnancies—much of this has to do with our backwards attitude about sex but I’ll leave that for another time.

Today is the first day of work for the new US Congress. The new majority in North Carolina is sworn in on January 26. If indeed their first focus is to repeal gains made by their predecessors, let’s start thinking about what names we can call them.

Check out Planned Parenthood’s own Destiny Lopez’s piece about the impact that no-cost birth control would have on Latinas on RH Reality Check today.

At Choice 2.0, we’ve written several times about the benefits of no-cost birth control in a country where the reality is that 98% of all women will use one or more methods of birth control in her lifetime. For Latinas in America, the potential impact is even greater.

Reading Ms. Lopez’s piece got me thinking about a common mistake we (surely it’s not just me?) sometimes make in the reproductive health community. There have been times where I find myself assuming that a Latina who identifies as Roman Catholic (as a majority do) automatically means that she is anti-choice, anti-birth control, and anti-gay in lockstep with the teachings of the Catholic Church. 
 

Yet like much of life, the reality is much more complex. As Ms. Lopez points out, “A huge majority of young Latinas — 89 percent — believe birth control costs should be available with no co-pay. This overwhelming level of support stems from the real experiences of young women struggling to balance financial and family priorities. In fact, more than half the Latinas in this group have experienced difficulty using birth control consistently due to cost barriers.” 

As a whole, 71% of Americans (including women and men) believe that birth control should be provided at no cost. Among American Catholics, this number rises to 77% of respondents expressing support.

As I said, I know that I have been guilty of wrongly assuming that women support or oppose one thing due to their self-identified religious beliefs (or lack thereof). Chalk it up to human nature and a desire to take very complex issues and boil them down to something overly simplified but easy to understand. In real life, regardless of faith, ethnicity, or any other factor, people across the board can agree that simple reforms that improve the health of women and their families and that prevent unintended pregnancies are good for society as a whole.

The fact is that life, including aspects like religion or faith, comes in shades of gray. It’s ultimately up to the individual woman, not a politician, to determine the best choices for her life in consultation with her doctor and family and in accordance with her faith… whatever that may or may not be.

If you support no-cost birth control for ALL women, sign our petition at http://www.birthcontrolmatters.org.

Election 2010 brought out a lot of negative rhetoric about health care reform. But yet when you explain many of the individual policies within health care reform, the policies within the bill enjoy overwhelming support from the American public. Some of the more popular provisions include allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans up to age 26 and requiring insurance companies not to deny coverage based on “pre-existing conditions.”

One of the most exciting provisions of the new law is that preventative medical services will be covered with no co-pays or cost-sharing. I recently went to the doctor for a physical and was waiting to check out credit card in hand to cover my $20 co-pay only to be told that I owed NOTHING. It completely made my day and was because my insurance company had preemptively begun to cover some preventative services in anticipation of the new law taking full effect.

When it comes to preventative services for women of childbearing age, birth control is almost always near the top of the list of services that these women ask for when visiting their primary care provider. We’ve written before about what birth control means for women’s lives and yesterday’s editorial in the New Jersey Star-Ledger really says is better than I ever could. (Just do yourself a favor and don’t read the comments. Unless you like to start your week with the feeling that your head is about to explode.)

The bottom line is that 98% of women will use one or more forms of birth control in her lifetime so it seems like common sense that prescription birth control would be covered as a “preventative service” along with annual exams, Pap tests and breast exams.

Like these other services, birth control should be available to every woman without co-pays or other out-of-pocket costs to ensure that every woman has access to the birth control that works best for her.

Planned Parenthood health centers see too many women choosing between birth control and basics like rent, tuition, and childcare. One in three female voters (34%) reports having struggled with the cost of prescription birth control at some point. Among young women, this figure rises dramatically: 55 percent of women 18–34 have struggled with the cost of prescription birth control.

Making birth control available at no cost is a common sense step that makes it possible for women to use the method that works best for them and will reduce the number of unintended pregnancies in America.

Last month, Planned Parenthood launched a new national campaign “Birth Control Matters” in an effort to encourage HHS officials to include birth control as a preventative service.  Please sign the petition to let Obama Administration and HHS officials know that no woman should ever have to choose between paying her rent and purchasing her birth control. Birth control IS prevention and must be fully covered under health care reform!

I’ve done my share of Obama bashing. He has driven me nuts in his total unwillingness to protect and defend reproductive freedom—a core value to his political base. But, enough is enough.

The alternative, my friend, is sheer insanity. Just check out the winner of last night’s Republican primary in Delaware to see for yourself.

Obama is far from perfect but he has delivered and it’s time we amplify his wins, especially for women.

Before Palin’s mama grizzlies, I always thought of myself as a mama bear when defending my young. So, I’ll match her grizzlies any day with my North Carolina black bear mama self and tell you why as a mother I am thankful to President Obama for health care reform.

First, I don’t know a mother on this planet who is not happy about being able to provide healthcare to her children through their 26th birthday. Most of us know how precarious our health coverage was between college and our first decent job.

Who among us did not go without dental care or an annual Pap smear in our early twenties? My own souvenir from that period is a crown I was forced to get after a cavity went beyond redemption during my grad school, no health insurance days. So, thank you, Mr. President, for letting me keep my kids covered until they can stand on their own professional feet.

No one plans to get sick, especially with a chronic or debilitating illness, but it happens every day. And, if you or your family has to stay in the hospital longer than you’d ever imagined, no insurance company can say, too bad, you’ve reached your annual limit. No more of those, thanks to President Obama.

If your worst nightmare comes true and you or a loved one becomes paralyzed or dependent on expensive medical treatments to live, no insurance company can deny you coverage because you’ve reached some arbitrary maximize lifetime limit. Thank you, Mr. President.

Every one who has ever had a child knows how vulnerable a parent feels when their child hurts. Imagine being told your health insurance will not cover your child because her condition existed before you changed jobs and got a new plan. Healthcare reform did away with pre-existing conditions for children.  Thanks again, Mr. President.

The benefits go on. I’ve said nothing about the millions of families who have no health insurance for whom health care reform means affordable, accessible care.

And, what does the opposition offer? Vows to fight abortion, to defend marriage discrimination, to build larger walls to keep immigrants out and to protect America’s richest 2% from paying taxes  Really? This is where America should be headed? No more bashing Obama for me, this is seriously wrong.

This month marks the 90^th Anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States and it’s looking more and more like time for another Suffrage Parade.

In 1913, Alice Paul and friends organized the Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC. They were frustrated by slow, incremental progress in their fight to win the vote. On March 3, more than 5,000 suffragists hit the streets in support of a woman’s right to vote. The Suffrage Parade was timed to coincide with Woodrow Wilson’s Presidential inauguration. The suffragists wanted to send a clear message—they would hold Wilson accountable for women’s suffrage.

Of course, there were many mainstream supporters of women’s suffrage who discouraged demonstrations like the Suffrage Parade. These supporters clung to incremental change, believing that state by state, women would gain the right to vote. They didn’t want to rock the boat and, of course, they didn’t want to risk offending their friends in power.

More than ninety years later and we’re still having the same debate. How much rocking do we do when our friends are captaining the boat? If this last year is any measure, it’s time we start moving.

  Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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