Getting Equitable Health Care for Women

For the very first time in American history, after about 100 years of discussion, the United States Senate has passed a comprehensive health care reform bill. This is an historic accomplishment, but it comes at an unacceptable price for American women. Obstacles to private health insurance coverage for abortion were included in the bill to gain the deciding vote of Senator Bill Nelson (D-NE), who opposes reproductive rights for women. This provision must be fixed before the bill becomes law if we are to truly achieve health care reform for all Americans, including women.

The truth is that health care reform was held hostage until the Senate agreed to include language that would require thousands of Mid-South women to unnecessarily write two checks to pay for private health insurance instead of one. One check would pay for abortion coverage and the other would pay for all other care and medical procedures. Health plans would then be required to set up a complex accounting scheme to separately allocate private insurance premiums for abortion and all other procedures.  Moreover, none of this complex bureaucracy has anything to do with the stated goal of making sure federal funds are kept separate from the private premiums used for abortion care.

At a time when we are trying to streamline our nation’s health insurance system and eliminate waste, why should we force health plans to implement an inefficient and administratively costly system? Any business that asked its customers to buy one product with two checks would soon be closed.  Requiring people to write two separate checks for their health coverage doesn’t accomplish anything other than the real goal of anti-choice politicians — making the system unworkable for women.

At Planned Parenthood in Memphis, almost 90 percent of the health care they provide is preventive in nature, including helping women choose the birth control method that’s best for them. What I know, and what is obvious to most Americans, is that women don’t plan an unplanned pregnancy or a complication in their wanted pregnancy any more than they plan to have a heart attack or a stroke or cancer. Like all Americans, women in Memphis want health insurance that is there for the unexpected. But like the Stupak abortion ban in the health care reform bill passed by the House of Representatives, the Nelson abortion provision in the Senate bill creates such complicated administrative burdens for health plans that it is highly unlikely insurers would offer abortion coverage at all — even for medically necessary abortion care in highly complicated pregnancies.

The American health care system is in dire need of reform and that is evident no place more than locally with the possible closing of services at The Med, the safety net for so many. Families know that health care reform legislation is not the place to re-argue the debate over abortion care. The leaders of Congress must remove the Nelson and Stupak provisions as they shape a final health care reform bill in a conference between members of the House and Senate. These bureaucratic barriers to abortion care don’t make for good health policy, and they won’t work for women. What we need is a health care bill that treats women and women’s health as well and as fairly as it treats men.