Many months, countless heated debates, and a thousand bill pages later, Obama and the Democratic Party finally managed to pass health care reform. In general, this new law means health care and extended coverage for the American people, but what does it mean specifically for the average American woman.
It is no secret that, in the United States, our health care system was once working more against us than for us. Although this was common information, many American women weren’t and still aren’t aware of the gender politics that occurred in the health care system.
Women all across the country experience hiked up premiums, minimal health coverage, and have to deal with the yearly growing list of preexisting conditions that prevent them from receiving the care they need because insurance companies theorized that it’s too expensive to cover us. Because of our frivolous concerns such as breast cancer prevention, adequate prenatal care, menopause management, and sexual health, companies believe that women will over-utilize health care services, and therefore economically inflate the health care system more than men.
That debatable theory causes insurance companies to charge a mother who had a cesarean section, higher premiums than men who are morbidly obese, diabetics, or smokers. This blatant discrimination has left many American women, of all demographics, without healthcare which is not only dangerous to them but entire families. The absence of health care for women generally translates into the lack of health care for an entire family, and can turn into a cycle of uninsured unhealthy people.
With the passing of the health care bill, women have a renewed chance to manage their health and livelihood apart from their finances, and social standing. Health care reform means that the young single mother who doesn’t qualify for Medicaid has access to health coverage for her child through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and significantly low cost insurance for herself in the coming years. For collegiate women and the unemployed college grad, it insures they can stay on their parents insurance while they focus on school and their career until the age of 26.
Pregnant women no longer have to worry that forgoing natural births, having epidurals, or motherhood in general will increase their insurance premiums. Women with sick children no longer have to be plagued with worry about how they will pay for their children’s treatment because effective immediately no sick child can be refused health care. Women who suffered through the terrors of domestic violence no longer have to go uninsured because their physical and mental scars are labeled as self-inflicted medical conditions.
In short, the passing of this historic health care reform symbolizes the beginning of the abolition of “gender rating”. It means simply in the words of speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, that “being a woman will no longer be a preexisting medical condition.”
Contributor: Marcella D. Camara
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