Planned Parenthood | Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund

August 19, 2009 3:11:14

by Liz
Web Correspondent
Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund

It would be an understatement to call the rhetoric around the health care reform debate either incendiary or intellectually dishonest.  The Family Research Council has been running an attack ad campaign claiming that health care reform would mandate coverage of abortion services.  (According to CNN.com, Catholics United, and FactCheck.org, among others, it would not.)  Humanevents.com stated in an email to supporters, even more outrageously, that "Grandmas and Unborn Babies Face Extermination by Obama's 'Health' Care Plan." 
 
I've seen a lot of people debunk the idea that there will be a mandate to cover abortion in health care reform, I've seen a number of different ideas about how to "save" health care reform from these accusations, and I've seen people argue that most of the US public supports health care coverage for abortions. One thing I've had trouble finding among all of this, though, is a reasoned discussion of health care reform.  And that's significant.  The boogeyman of abortion and the increasingly exaggerated claims about what health care reform will do is distracting us from issues that really need discussing and the problems with our health care system that really need fixing.
 
So what is important about health care reform?
 
Among other things, health care reform is very much a women's health issue.  Since women are currently insured by public health care providers at a much higher rate than their male counterparts, they are even more in need of a comprehensive, low-cost health care program.  The current health care program causes a significant problem with medical debt in this country: according to research done by the Commonwealth Fund in 2007, 1/3 of all women (and 1/4 of men) were either unable to pay for basic necessities like food or rent, had used up all their savings, had taken out a mortgage, or had taken on credit card debt because of medical bills.  Not surprisingly, the least insured were the hardest hit: over half of underinsured women and almost half of uninsured women had made one of those decisions in the past two years.  The end result of all these issues is that over half of all US women couldn't access needed, routine health care in 2007 because of access problems related to cost.
 
So: people should support health care reform because they support women having access to basic, needed health care without having to bankrupt themselves or send themselves into debt.
 
Discuss.

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