What does the health care reform bill provide women?

First and foremost, the new law offers major advances for women’s reproductive health. It offers

• preventive reproductive health care to women covered by Medicaid, the nation’s largest public health insurance program for women of child-bearing age
• free or low-cost preventive screenings for cancer for millions of women, including Nevadans
• affordable private health insurance coverage which women can use to pay for reproductive health care at their local community providers, including Planned Parenthood health centers

More generally, the bill does the following for women and women’s health:

•  extends private health insurance and Medicaid coverage to millions of women
•  stops insurers from charging women more than they charge men for comprehensive private health insurance plans
• forbids insurers from denying private health insurance to women based on “pre-existing” conditions such as pregnancy
•  extends health care coverage to more children and young adults, relieving parents of both financial and emotional burdens. 

Did the victory over Stupak ensure unfettered access to private health insurance coverage for abortion in the final bill?

Despite our victory over anti-choice Congressman Stupak and his allies, we were unable to strip out other restrictions on private health insurance coverage for abortion from the final bill.  These restrictions, proposed by Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, are less onerous than those proposed by Rep. Stupak, but they place unacceptable burdens on insurers and consumers who want to respectively sell and purchase private health insurance plans that cover abortion.  Essentially what the Nelson amendment requires is women who want abortion coverage insurance to have to pay separately from all other health care. No insurance company is set up to do this and the fear is that rather than try to offer this service (and according to Guttmacher Institute 86% of insurance companies already do), that the insurance providers will simply drop abortion care coverage. We are working now to do as much as we can to fix these unfair and unnecessary requirements before they go into effect in 2014.  (Please see What’s Next below.)

What’s next?

The passage of health care reform was the first critical step in bringing quality, affordable reproductive health care to tens of millions more women, but after a bill is signed into law, there is much more to be done to ensure that the law is applied to achieve the intended goals of the legislation.  

To that end, Planned Parenthood will focus on working with the following:

• the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that early health care reform guidance and regulation meet women’s needs  
• the administration and congressional leaders to address the unworkable Nelson provision so that health insurance companies will continue to provide health insurance coverage for abortion
• state policymakers to encourage expansion of family planning services to low-income women through Medicaid