Health Care Reform is a Woman’s Issue
Women need more health care than men because of the combined demands of pregnancy and family planning. The typical American woman who wants to have two children will spend about five years being pregnant, recovering from pregnancy or trying to get pregnant, and about 30 years trying to avoid unintended pregnancies.
Partly as a result, young women typically must pay more than young men for individual health insurance, unless they live in one of 10 states where gender rating is illegal.
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Many women gain access to their health insurance through their husbands. That means that male job losses as well as the possibility of divorce leave them vulnerable. A recent report by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress estimates that about 1.7 million women have lost health insurance benefits as a result of job losses since December 2007 — 71 percent of these as a result of their spouses’ job loss.
Although fewer adult women than men lack health insurance, they seem to be more affected by insurance-related problems, including inadequate coverage. A Commonwealth Fund study released last May found that about 52 percent of working-age women, compared to 39 percent of working-age men, reported in 2007 that they had to forgo filling a prescription, seeing a specialist, obtaining a recommended medical test or seeing a doctor at all as a result of medical costs.
Read the full summary here.
Between the disproportionate amount of time and money women have to spend maintaining or preventing pregnancy, the fact that women tend to be the primary caregivers for dependents who are ill, and that women still make less on the dollar than their male counterparts and need to make that dollar stretch further when it comes to health care purchases, health care reform truly is a woman’s issue.
