BlogHers Talk Health Care with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (AUDIO)

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi joined BlogHers for a health care reform discussion where she tackled many questions on women and health care.

The Speaker spent 30 minutes answering questions from maternity care to middle class tax implications from a variety of women bloggers.

You can listen to the call with Speaker Pelosi -

Or you can read the transcript of the call -

**start transcript**

Nancy Watzmen: Hi. Welcome everyone. I’m Nancy Watsmen of the Sunlight Foundation representing Blogher today in their community journalism initiative on healthcare policy.

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparencies.

As CEO (Lisa Stone) announced, Blogher is sponsoring the bi-partisan series of telephone conference calls to connect women bloggers directly with legislators.

Today on the call we have House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who as you all know is right in the thick of the healthcare debate and we’ll turn the call over to her for an introduction and then I know lots of people have question so we’ll get right to them. Speaker Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi: Thank you very much Nancy and thanks for the opportunity to share some thoughts about healthcare reform especially how the impact - how it impacts women on this call today.

We are very enthusiastic about where we are on this legislation this week. The Senate and Finance Committee passed its bill out, now five committees have. We are closer to having health insurance reform as we ever have been in our history.

And it is from the standpoint of the House of Representatives which I speak for in terms of our initiative, our principals our that we will have affordability for the middle class and we will have security for America’s seniors and we will have responsibility to our children to make this bill very fiscally sound. And it doesn’t add a dime to the deficit.

When it comes to women in particular, women have the most to gain in health insurance reform in my view. Women often face higher health care costs in men and face multiple other barriers to obtaining health insurance, for example, women are charged up to 48% more then men in the individual market.

In our bill it would make it illegal for insurance companies to use gender ratings, charging women more then men for the same coverage. In addition, women are denied coverage or charged more for preexisting conditions like pregnancy, C-Sections or domestic violence.

If you’ve ever been in any of those situation and of course we - our bill makes it against the law for (unintelligible) who are denied coverage or charged higher premiums on the basis or preexisting conditions.

Just a couple more things - 79% of women with individual market policies do not have any maternity coverage. Imagine that. In our legislation exchange would be required to cover maternity services and over time plans outside the exchange would be required to do so as well.

Again, many women do not have access to employer-provided coverage. This will be changed in the bill because premium assistance would be provided to all those with an income up to 400% of poverty which is about for a couple about 80-some thousand dollars or 40-some for an individual.

Even employer-provided coverage is in decline and so we’re trying to change that dynamic as well. And women’s (health) face more unaffordable out-of-pocket costs and preventative services are also often unaffordable to women and their children. And the legislation changes that. And it just would - putting on this opening, just relate to the economy.

Over one million women have lost health insurance coverage due to their spouse’s job loss and they also then because of their own job loss when the women are in the market - are working - are some of the first people to be let go and therefore lose their health insurance.

So it is important for us to have health insurance that expands coverage for all. It does - do it in a way that improves the quality, lowers the cost and enables people to keep what they have if they like it but also to recognize the disparities that exist for women and health care.

Pleased to take any questions and again I thank you Nancy for the opportunity to share some thoughts on our legislation.

Nancy Watzmen: Well thank you. Yes, let’s go straight to the first caller.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen if you would like to register a question, please