You know what is more upsetting than listening to a room full of men debate over OUR rights to access when it comes to birth control, abortion, and women’s health all around? I didn’t know until I watched the first presidential debate, but it turns out hearing absolutely nothing about it grosses me out even more.
What women* will gain from the Affordable Care Act
Some 32 million people (a majority women) will gain access to health care insurance coverage including 16 million people (also a majority women) who will gain access through Medicaid.
Subsidies to purchase coverage
- About three-fourths of people who purchase through the insurance exchanges (those with incomes between 133% and 400% of poverty) will receive a federal subsidy to help pay for the coverage.
Bans Discrimination
- By 2014 at the latest, insurers will be banned from “gender rating,” or charging women higher premiums than men for the same coverage, both for individual policies and for employer group plans with fewer than 100 employees. In most states, women with individual plans pay on the average some 48% higher premiums than men for the same health insurance coverage.
No Co-Pays or Deductibles for Preventive Care including Birth Control
- Every new insurance policy is required to include the basic preventive health care package without any co-pays or deductibles. As recommended by the Institutes of Medicine, this includes pap smears, mammograms, birth control, STI/STD testing, well woman checkups, immunizations and other preventive care.
Discrimination Based on Pre-Existing Conditions Eliminated
- Exclusions for pre-existing conditions were immediately eliminated for children in 2010, and will be eliminated in 2014 for adults. This will prevent the exclusion of coverage for women who have “pre-existing conditions” such as pregnancy, prior injuries caused by domestic violence, the second or subsequent Caesarian delivery, re-occurrence of breast cancer, etc. A temporary high risk insurance pool program is available to cover eligible adults with pre-existing conditions until 2014.
Bans Insurers from Dropping Coverage Because of Illness
Mandatory Coverage of Maternity Care and Specific Health Services
- Beginning January 1, 2014, individual and small employer plans must cover at a minimum a comprehensive package of “essential health benefits” including, for example, pre-natal and maternity care, prescription drug coverage, mental health care, and pediatric care (including oral and vision care). Currently 87 percent of individual health insurance plans exclude maternity coverage.
Mental Health Parity
Benefits for Older People
- Medicare guaranteed benefits are not reduced.
- Beginning in 2011, Medicare now covers the full cost of preventive care, including cancer screenings, annual physical examinations and immunizations.
- The Medicare prescription drug “Donut Hole” will be gradually eliminated, starting with a $250 payment to beneficiaries in 2010 and a 50% discount on Medicare Part D prescription drug costs. By 2020, payments by beneficiaries will be reduced to 25% of drug costs in the gap.
Ban on Discrimination against Lower Paid Employees
- Employers will not be allowed to provide inferior plans with less coverage to their lower-paid workers, who are more likely to be women and people of color.
Addresses National Nursing and Primary Care Physicians Shortage
- The law increases the numbers of nursing education slots, providing loan repayments and retention grants and offering grants for employment and training of family nurse practitioners. It provides scholarships, loan programs and bonus payments to private care physicians and general surgeons. It also expands health accessibility by doubly the capacity of community health centers. New programs will increase support for school-based and nurse-managed health centers.
(Added the asterisk in the title, because a lot of this stuff applies to people with uteruses who don’t ID as women.)
Over Two Decades, Abortion Rate Dropped For Women In Their 20s Because Of Contraception Access
By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jun 20, 2012 at 1:10 pm
Source
Between 1990 and 2008, pregnancy and abortion rates for women in their twenties dropped dramatically, a new study revealed today. Pregnancy rates fell by 18 percent, while abortion rates dropped by a third.
One of the biggest influencing factors in this decrease is the growing accessibility, use, and options for birth control. Contraceptive use is the best way to prevent abortions in the U.S. Over time, young women have gotten greater access to a larger number of pregnancy prevention methods. The study explains two main causes in the drop:
The introduction of new contraceptive methods and discontinuation of existing ones and]changes in the use of existing methods: the proportion of women using any method, the methods used, and how consistently and effectively they are used.
Indeed, only 70 percent of women (PDF) who started having sex between 1990 and 1994 used protection, whereas 84 percent did between 2005 and 2008:
And President Obama’s new policy that expands access to birth control will help ensure that more women can get contraception when they need it.
Currently, over half of pregnancies are unintended in the United States. Growing access to prevention methods will lead to a decrease in such unintended pregnancies. Other factors — including the trend toward getting married at an older age — also contribute to the pregnancy drop for 20-somethings.
In college, I used to pretty obsessively watch House, MD. First off, Hugh Laurie is a total silver fox babe, and second, I’m a sucker for medical dramas.
One episode features a 600 pound man with some sort of mystery disease. They keep testing him for diseases that are weight related but all of his results come back normal. He finally tells the doctors, “I’ve been fat all my life, but sick only recently. If you want to look for a disease that has nothing to do with my size, I’ll help you. Otherwise, leave me alone.” House finally accidentally notices that the patient isn’t dying because he’s fat, but because he has lung cancer.
This episode stuck with me because it showed (however fictitiously), that doctors aren’t always right, and that a fat person can stand up for himself in a health care setting. I’ve spent my youth accepting every single diagnosis thrown at me by doctors. I’ve been tested for blood sugar problems, cholesterol problems, and thyroid problems, despite no other symptoms leading to those diagnoses. At 16, my doctor prescribed me phentermine, a habit forming appetite suppressant. None of the tests explained my fatness, and none of the drugs “cured” me. I was lead me to believe that being overweight was such a serious health issue that I should bravely accept the battery of tests, and take a dangerous, addictive drug because it might make me skinnier.
A few years later I got a job at a community clinic. In that job I learned how to take blood pressure, and I got to teach this skill to a bunch of awesome volunteers! The day after one of these marathon training sessions, that left my arms bruised from so much blood pressure cuffing, I had my first check up with my new doctor. I picked this doctor because she was promised to be queer and trans friendly, but I was also pretty terrified because at that point the doctor’s office was a place that I was told I was too fat, and where I never felt I could defend my gender or sexual orientation.
At first, all my fears were confirmed. The medical assistant who brought me back sat me down at the electronic blood pressure machine and strapped me in. The machine pumped and spat out a number that was ALARMINGLY high. And because I had my blood pressure taken no less than 15 times the DAY BEFORE and knew that the number was waaaayyyy above where it should be, I told the MA that the number wasn’t right. She looked me up and down and replied, “these machines are very accurate.” Thank god my doctor wasn’t a total tool and agreed to re-take my blood pressure the old-fashioned way. Low and behold, the number that came back was my usual low number — below the national average, in fact!
I just saw this same doctor a few weeks ago for my yearly physical exam. Blood pressure was normal, all my tests came back great, and I was given a clean bill of health. She noted my weight had crept up a bit, but agreed it was probably because I had recently spent a bunch of time bed ridden in a giant cast recovering from surgery. She ended the visit with, “There is absolutely no reason you can’t be totally healthy at your current weight.” Score another one for my kick ass doctor who realizes that I can be fat AND healthy!
The next day, I gleefully went in for my annual gyno exam with my trans and queer friendly gyno, expecting another positive visit. I told her I was planning on getting pregnant in the next 5 years, and her response was, “You should lose weight before you get pregnant because people who go into pregnancies overweight are more likely to get gestational diabetes and high blood pressure.” The blood drained from my face and I felt outraged.
“Wait,” I demanded, “are ALL fat pregnant people at risk for those things? Or just fat pregnant people who had those risks before they got pregnant?” After much heated back and forth she finally admitted that I probably wasn’t at risk for gestational diabetes or high blood pressure since I didn’t have those problems currently. I left the appointment crestfallen and furious. Instead of relevant prenatal info, I was told that I was too fat to get pregnant. I had to fight with my provider to get her to admit that not all fat people have risky pregnancies.
As a fat person living a healthy life, I shouldn’t have to defend my healthiness to my provider, who has all of the information to know better. Fatness does not automatically make a person unhealthy. Blood pressure, blood sugar levels, cholesterol, how much exercise a person gets, how well they eat, their mental and emotional health and SO MUCH MORE determines how healthy they are. I know how lucky I am to have access to healthcare and competent providers, but I will no longer be shamed into thinking I’m too fat to be healthy by ANYONE, let alone my doctor. My health problems are not necessarily due to my weight, and I shouldn’t have to prove this fact to, sometimes quite literally, defend my wellbeing.
18.03.2012 -Weekly Links Round Up
Republican-Controlled Arizona Legislature On Cusp Of Defunding Planned Parenthood (Thinkprogress.org)
Arizona is the latest battleground in the conservative war on women as the state legislature appears poised to strip funding from the women’s health care provider Planned Parenthood.
Ban of abortion after 6 weeks passes Mississippi House (The Arkansas Online
A Mississippi House bill would effectively ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
How To Be A Feminist Man (FeministActionCambridge)
Recently a man friend asked me if I thought he was being a feminist in his behaviour, and if not, how he could improve. That conversation led to me writing this post.
Men Still Make the Decisions on Reproductive Rights in Cote d’Ivoire (IPS News)
“I would like to use contraception, but my husband is against it,” says Bintou Moussa. The 32-year-old mother has just given birth to her sixth child at the Abobo General Hospital in Cote d’Ivoire’s commercial capital Abidjan
Those Bodies in Baghdad Are of Gay Men
Dozens of bodies bludgeoned to death pop up in Baghdad’s dusty streets like the remains of a wreckage on a beach. They are the corpses of homosexuals and followers of the ‘emo’ fashion who dare to break with the strict canons of the Shia orthodoxy in power.
Parties ‘failing to push for more women’ in Scottish and Welsh parliaments (The Guardian)
Electoral Reform Society accuses all the large parties of allowing the issue of equal representation for women to ‘fester’.
How we can connect with feminism’s global future (Naomi Wolf)
In the west, feminism has stalled. But elsewhere, women have found in it a new model of Enlightenment rights and freedoms
I’m not racist, some of my colleagues are white – what is ‘diversity’ anyway? (The Guardian)
The Harvard Business Review is right – diversity schemes can be dangerous if they ignore socioeconomic divisions.
The UK’s hidden cancer (The Guardian)
Why is there still so little awareness of ovarian cancer? Two women who have had it talk about the importance of an early diagnosis.
The Symptoms of Ovarian Cancer
Feminists and Plastic Surgeons Unite to Outlaw Cosmetic Surgery Ads (UkFeminista)
UK Feminista has launched a campaign today calling on the Government to outlaw the advertising of cosmetic surgery.
THAT Doonesbury Strip on Abortion in Texas (STFU Conservatives)
