Healthcare Compromise: Low-Income Women Get Bumped

Democrats in the Senate got what they wanted this Christmas: a passed health care reform bill. Low-income women, however, seemed to be the ones with coal in their stocking.

Democrats in the Senate got what
they wanted this Christmas: a passed health care reform bill.
Low-income women, however, seemed to be the ones with coal in their stocking.
Led by Vice-President Joe Biden, the 60-39 vote along party lines on December
24, 2009 ensured that this historic bill will move forward and potentially
become law if the House and Senate can reconcile their two different versions
of the legislation in 2010. The House will begin the reconciliation process on
January 12, 2010 and the Senate on January 19.
The New York Times
reports that "If the two chambers can strike a deal, as seems likely, the
resulting product would vastly expand the role and responsibilities of the
federal government. It would, as lawmakers said repeatedly in the debate, touch
the lives of nearly all Americans…. If the bill becomes law, it would be a
milestone in social policy, comparable to the creation of Social Security in
1935 and Medicare in 1965."
However, when it comes to the issue of abortion, it is a lose-lose situation
for women, specifically those who are non-white and low-income. Both the Senate
and House versions of the bill limit a woman’s access to abortion, as outlined by the Times.
In the House version, low and middle-income people who buy insurance through
the exchange — the public marketplace for insurance — will not have any
health care options that cover abortions. The additional danger with this
stipulation added by Rep. Bart Stupak
(D-MI) is that as the private market begins to mimic the public market,
abortion coverage for women could decrease. Currently, 87 percent of private
insurance plans cover the legal medical procedure and the House bill could
effectively reduce women’s health care rights, rather than increase them over
time in not only the public sphere, but the private one as well.
The Senate version is a little less obvious in its attack on women’s reproductive
choice. While the public plan in the Senate bill would include abortion (with
federal funds being separated from paying for this procedure), the legislation
would allow individual states to prohibit coverage of abortion.
Currently, 17 states opt in to paying for abortion through Medicaid, indicating
they will leave such coverage intact with the offerings through the exchange.
It is unclear how the remaining 33 states will react, which makes it possible
for abortion rights to be completely stripped from the hands of low-income
women by the predominantly male-led state legislatures.
While one of the national non-profit plans in the exchange should cover
abortion in the Senate bill, that choice is not left with women individually,
but given to the state. If a state opts out of abortion coverage in the
exchange, this would leave Planned Parenthood clinics as the only viable option
for those seeking access to abortion without a private insurance plan.

According to the Guttmacher Institute
"nearly half of all pregnancies to American women are unintended and four in 10
of these end in abortion." Guttmacher also reports that unintended pregnancies
have increased by 29 percent among poor women while decreasing 20 percent among
higher-income women.
When you review these basic statistics it becomes increasingly clear that the
provisions in both the House bill and Senate bill would hurt low-income women,
who are primarily non-white. The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research
notes, "Latina and Native American women are the most likely to have limited
family incomes while 41 percent of African American women, 28 percent of
Asian/Pacific Islander women and 29 percent of multiple-race women have low
incomes. In comparison, 16 percent of white women are in low-income families."
In order to protest these rollbacks to reproductive choice, the Women’s Media Center
released a new video to increase the
sense of urgency about women’s rights in the health care reform process. The
center’s latest campaign, NotUnderTheBus.com, asks
individuals to call Congress, write letters and articles to make sure that
women’s voices are heard and their rights are not thrown under the bus in
health care reform.
While the short term goal is to keep abortion restrictions out of the final
health care bill, NotUndertheBus.com is a long term project that will be
working to move the conversation about health care back to the original problem
the Hyde Amendment and the need to repeal it
and change the media narrative to one that centers on women’s rights as human
rights.

This article originally appeared at The Cafe at On The
Issues
.