Obama Care Opposition and Women's Healthcare

News & SocietyNews

  • Author Luis Valentino
  • Published April 10, 2017
  • Word count 423

Katie Hogan, Executive Director of Organizing for Action is sharing her comments on the Obama Care repeal and replace efforts, and women's healthcare. There is still time to take action by calling your Representatives.

This is the group that is deciding the future of women's health care.

In this room, top opponents of Obamacare met yesterday to try to hammer out last-minute changes to their disastrous repeal bill.

The first version of the bill already had plenty of unnerving provisions. It would hike costs for families who need help the most. It would cut off all federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides crucial health services to millions of women every year. And of course, it would leave 24 million fewer people insured, in large part by pushing millions of low-income Americans off of Medicaid. That means that on top of everything else, many poor women would lose their access to free contraception that was guaranteed under Obamacare to everyone with insurance.

Repealing Obamacare would be a disaster for women's health, but there is still time to call your representative and make your support of this law known. Use OFA's online tool to call your representative before they vote on repeal today.

Apparently, all of the provisions above still didn't go far enough for some members of the House, so they gathered in this room to make some additional changes. In an effort to win a few more votes, the congressmen in the room urged the White House to scrap the "Essential Health Benefits" provision, which requires all insurance plans to cover certain critical services.

So what exactly would scrapping these benefits mean? Well, among other things:

Insurers would no longer be required to cover pregnancy, maternity, or newborn care, making it much more costly and more difficult to obtain.

Preventative care, like mammograms, Pap smears, and birth control would no longer be free and guaranteed.

A return to the days where insurers can impose lifetime limits on patients with expensive illnesses.

Taken together, there's no way around it -- these changes would once again make being a woman a pre-existing condition. These members of Congress took a bill that would already wreak havoc on the lives of millions of Americans and worked to gut its most important remaining protections, with women set to disproportionately pay the price.

The policies they pushed might make sense to the people in that room, but America doesn't look a whole lot like that room. Some of us don't want our essential health benefits ripped away from us.

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