NOW Renews Call for Universal, Single-Payer Health Insurance

New Reports Focus on Women's Health Care

May 22, 2004

by NOW Staff

NOW Action Vice President Olga Vives, speaking at a recent Capitol Hill briefing sponsored by OWL: Older Women's League, renewed NOW's call for a system of universal health care coverage much like an expanded and improved Medicare program—available to all.

Noting that 43.6 million people are now without health insurance, Vives said access to health care should be a "right" and not a privilege. "Surely, the richest, most technologically-advanced nation in the world can afford to recognize and guarantee access to medical care as a necessity and a fundamental human right."

Vives added, "More than 75 million persons (nearly 28% of the total U.S. population) were without health care at some point during 2001 and 2002. That is a shameful fact! Because of this, each year 18,000 people die prematurely and eight million with chronic illnesses become sicker because they lack health insurance." Read her full remarks online.

The National Organization for Women adopted in 1993 a resolution supporting a universal, single-payer health care system in the United States, emphasizing that such a system would best address the disparities in our current patchwork system that disadvantage women. These disparities include denial of certain reproductive health care services, disproportionately higher costs for women for long-term care insurance and sex-stereotyped biases in health research and provision of care.

In observance of Mother's Day, OWL released a new report, A Poor Prognosis: Health Care Costs and Aging Women, which notes that working people are increasingly losing health care coverage; that midlife women often fall into a "gap" between Medicare eligibility and employer-based insurance; that Medicare's shortcomings disadvantage older women because they live longer and are poorer; and, that real health care reform should not privatize state and federal programs or shift responsibility entirely onto individuals. In addition to endorsing universal, single-payer health insurance, OWL's recommendations for the near-term are that Congress should:

• Enact Medicare early "buy-in" policies for midlife people to help those between ages of approximately 45 and 65 who have no insurance;

• Increase benefits in Medicare to cover more of the costs of health care for older persons who are finding it increasingly difficult to pay for needed "Medi-gap" insurance; and,

• Repeal and replace the recently signed Medicare Prescription Drug and Modernization Act of 2003, which offers only a weak drug benefit and forces older persons to leave Medicare and join a private managed care plan (which could raise rates and reduce coverage) while dooming the government-run Medicare program by reducing funding, among many other flaws.

Read the full report online or send a message to owlinfo@owl-national.org to request a hard copy.

The National Women's Law Center (NWLC) released a report card on women's health care in the 50 states and nationally, finding that no state could be given the grade of "Satisfactory" when evaluated according to 27 health status benchmarks. Entitled "Making the Grade on Women's Health: a National and State-by-State Report Card," the comprehensive study was conducted with the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and used the goals set by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for the Health People initiative to reach by 2010.

Nationally, the U.S. comes up short in meeting its own Healthy People initiative, having met only two of the 27 benchmarks and leading Dr. Michelle Berlin, an OHSU professor, to call the outlook for women's health "grim."

States are not doing much better. The 27 benchmarks measure health status factors such as percentage of women with health insurance, percent of women receiving breast cancer screening, pap smears, prenatal care and dental care, and availability of smoking cessation programs. States that were ranked highest included Minnesota, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Colorado, Utah, Main and Washington. Ten lowest ranking states were: Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, District of Columbia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

The evaluation also looked at whether states have implemented 67 important women's health policies, like Medicaid coverage for breast and cervical cancer screening and prevention of tobacco sales to minors. Only three states (New York, California and Rhode Island) met a majority of the 67 policy goals.

Women's health depends a great deal on where they live and on the availability of health insurance. For instance, two and a half times more women in the District of Columbia die from heart disease than in Hawaii. Nine out of ten women in New Hampshire receive prenatal care in the first trimester as contrasted with only 69 percent of women in New Mexico.

With nearly nine percent of all women receiving Medicaid, the report looked at policies that either weaken or improve the program, and concluded that many improvements have been offset by weakening other important state health policies.

The study also mentioned preventive care, access to the full range of reproductive services and such economic security factors as an adequate minimum wage, paid family leave and child support collections for each state.