What’s the good, bad and ugly of women’s health in the past decade?
	Check out the 2010 edition of Making the Grade on Women’s Health: A National and State-by-State Report Card to find out how healthy women in your state are and how the new health care law will affect women’s health policies and women’s health.

What do The Lord of the Rings trilogy, HBO’s show “The Wire,” Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love,” fewer women smokers, and colorectal cancer screenings for women have in common? They all made it to the top of a “best of the decade” list.

Find out the good, bad, and the ugly of women’s health in the past decade: check out the 2010 edition of Making the Grade on Women’s Health: A National and State-by-State Report Card for a detailed prognosis.

In the years since the National Women’s Law Center and Oregon Science and Health University published the first edition of Making the Grade on Women’s Health: A National and State-by-State Report Card, the nation’s “best of” list for women’s health includes lower death rates from coronary heart disease, stroke, and breast and lung cancer. In addition, fewer women are smoking and more women are being screened for colorectal cancer. Unfortunately, however, there are now greater proportions of women with high blood pressure and who haven’t had a recent Pap test. Our “worst of the decade” list includes increases in rates of diabetes, Chlamydia and binge drinking.

In this fifth edition, the Report Card grades and ranks each state based on 26 health-status benchmarks. It also identifies whether states have met 68 health policy goals, many of which will be affected by the new health care law passed this year.

To find out which policy goals the new health care law will achieve, click on the Report Card policy indicator on any issue you want to learn more about.

For example:

• Mammograms — Starting on September 23 of this year, private insurance began covering mammograms because of a provision in the new law requiring all health plans to cover recommended preventive services at no charge to the woman.
• Gender rating in the individual health insurance market, or the practice of charging women more than men for health care coverage — Starting in 2014, the new health care law will prohibit insurance companies from using the practice of gender rating in the individual insurance market, a marked improvement from today, when 37 states have no policy related to this issue.

We started this comprehensive examination of women’s health a decade ago, after earlier attempts to enact affordable, accessible, and comprehensive health care reform failed in Congress. This year, the Center went to work and helped achieve a big victory to improve women’s health with the passage of the Affordable Care Act. And we’re confident that, thanks to the new health care law, in another 10 years, the “best of the decade” list for women’s health will be much longer!

Sincerely,