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This post is second in the series of three looking at what the Affordable Health Care Act means in tangible terms to each of us. The first was Barbara O'Brien's optimistic "Health Care Reform Will Help Everybody." Today, in a post that originally appeared in the Women's Review of Books blog, I address women's health specifically in both a personal and political context.
Remember, that the Department of Health and Human Services launched a new website, HealthCare.gov, on July 1 to help consumers wade through the new law's provisions and how they will affect our access to health care. So do check that out, and as always, your comments and ideas are very welcome here.
Splitting the Health-Reform Baby: What Women Lost by Winning
Let me be clear: Had I been a member of Congress, I would have pressed the “yes” lever for the health-reform bill when it came down to the vote for final passage. It was incredibly important that we start somewhere to make health care accessible and affordable to all Americans. And we can celebrate, as Ms. magazine recounts in “What the Health Care Bill Means for Women,” that contraceptives will be covered, gender rating that discriminates against women has been eliminated and preventive services such as pap smears will be covered without co-pay under the new plan.
But sometimes when you win, you lose.
I am spitting mad about the way my values -- and those of so many women and men, including the band of forty or so Congresswomen, led by pro-choice caucus chair Rep. Diana DeGette, who fought valiantly against the Stupak-Pitts amendment -- were callously pitted one against another. Stupak-Pitts would have written into permanent law the current Hyde Amendment ban on coverage for abortions for women whose health care is paid for by the federal government. And it would have extended the ban to the rest of us if we purchased insurance with private funds through a federal insurance exchange.
This Solomon-like decision represents not the proverbial win-win compromise that politicians are supposed to seek but a net loss for women. The loss of important health coverage hurts, but I predict the political loss will ultimately turn out to be even more devastating.
In the end, President Obama himself, who during his campaign supported getting rid of the Hyde amendment, issued an executive order that implements restrictions almost identical to Stupak-Pitts.
And candidate Obama, who in 2008 enthusiastically promised to pass the Freedom of Choice Act to guarantee reproductive right including access to abortion, just a year later as President said FOCA wasn’t on his legislative agenda.
As RH Reality Check put it, insurance coverage for abortion is now an endangered species.
This show of weakness by the President, the congressional leadership and the women's movement for not holding politicians’ feet to the fire has serious political consequences. The women’s groups early on acceded to the so-called “compromise” Capps Amendment that would have maintained the status-quo Hyde restrictions: leaving poor women out in the uncovered cold but retaining coverage for women with private-pay insurance.
Once they had given in on that key principle, there wasn’t much women’s groups could say or do to establish their moral authority or political power to buck the administration’s appeasing ways. Appeasing is like throwing a hungry jackal a small piece of red meat -- it just howls for more.
Predictably, a proliferation of state measures aimed at restricting abortions, punishing women who seek them and serving as test cases to overturn Roe v. Wade has been unleashed. In “A Spreading Peril for Women’s Privacy and Freedom,” Dorothy Samuels cataloged these new threats
