Public Health Insurance Option Necessary For Reform Efforts To Help Women, Opinion Piece Says

"Women are the victims of a health care system that treats most people badly at one point or another but that treats women badly all the time," Nancy Ratzan, president of the National Council of Jewish Women, writes in a Miami Herald opinion piece.

Ratzan cites several statistics to demonstrate why the stakes of the health reform debate "couldn't be higher for women." For example, according to the National Women's Law Center, seven in 10 women are "either uninsured or underinsured, struggling to pay a medical bill or experiencing another cost-related problem in accessing needed care," she writes. The situation is "most dire for African-American, Hispanic and Native-American women, who suffer such problems two to three times as often as white women," according to Ratzan.

Insurers can legally discriminate on the basis of gender in 38 states, and the cost of insurance policies for women can be 40% higher than policies for men "even when maternity benefits are excluded," Ratzan says. "Women are less likely than men to qualify for their employer's insurance program, because they are more likely to work part time and to have lower-wage jobs," according to Ratzan. In addition, women "are more susceptible to losing insurance because of divorce or widowhood" because they are more likely to rely on their spouses' policies. "One of the most egregious practices allows insurance companies in eight states and the District of Columbia to deem domestic violence a 'pre-existing condition' and deny coverage to its victims," Ratzan writes.

Ratzan continues that "[r]elying on the insurance industry alone to accomplish what it has been unable or unwilling to do for the last 50 years will only prolong an untenable situation," which is why health reform should include "a public health insurance option to lower costs and ensure universal affordable coverage." She notes that a recent SurveyUSA report found that 75% of U.S. residents support a public option, and that a recent poll in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 73% of doctors favor it. Despite this, the public option is "repeatedly dismissed out of hand in the back rooms on Capitol Hill, even by supposed moderates," Ratzan says. She concludes that only when a public option is available "will all of us enjoy a standard of health care that Congress itself takes for granted" (Ratzan, Miami Herald, 9/21).


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