Tag Archives: Health law

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Repeal Vote Imminent: Women’s Health at Risk … a message from someone who knows

01/18/2011 Nativegrl77

Tell your Representative to vote NO on repealing the health care law.

Call 877-667-6650

Tomorrow, the House will vote on a bill to repeal the new health care law. Repealing the law would risk access to health care and affordable insurance coverage for all women and women like me — a rape survivor.

Please call 877-667-6650 and tell your Member of Congress to vote NO on repealing the health care law.

Eight years ago, I was drugged and raped while on a business trip. I’m lucky to be alive.

At the time, I was a health insurance agent and when I needed new insurance, I knew how hard it would be to get coverage due to the medical treatment I received for my assault. I needed counseling and preventive anti-HIV medications but the insurance companies didn’t care what I needed. To them, being treated for rape qualified as a “pre-existing condition” and they said they wouldn’t cover someone like me.

The only coverage I could find would have cost almost as much as my monthly rent. So for three years, I was uninsured. I paid for my counseling, my medication, and all my day-to-day health needs out of pocket. I was lucky I could afford to do that. It wasn’t easy, though, and being uninsured was a big worry I faced every day.

The new health care law puts an end to insurance companies treating women like a pre-existing condition. But that’s not all — the law is already helping women and their families by providing no-cost preventive health care services, preventing insurance companies from dropping patients when they become sick, and prohibiting insurance companies from limiting the amount of money they will pay for benefits over a woman’s lifetime. All this is at risk.

Please call 877-667-6650 and tell your Member of Congress to vote NO on repealing the health care law.

The new health care law works for all of us. But repeal will put me and millions of other women and their families at the mercy of the insurance industry again. We can’t go back.

Please send a strong message. Call your Member of Congress today.

Sincerely,

Chris Turner

Denying Contraceptive Coverage is Harmful to Women

12/16/2010 Nativegrl77


	Denying Contraceptive Coverage is Harmful to Women



	Tell the EEOC to fully enforce the law.

Does your employer-sponsored health insurance cover your birth control? Most of us couldn’t have said “yes” ten years ago.

This week marks an important anniversary of a major legal advance for women: ten years ago, in response to a petition filed by the National Women’s Law Center, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that it is illegal sex discrimination for some employer-sponsored health insurance plans to cover prescriptions and preventive care but not to cover contraceptives for women.

This was a major legal advance for women, but our work is not done. We still need to make sure that the EEOC is doing all it can do to enforce its landmark ruling, and that women receive the full protection of the law.

More than ten years ago, the National Women’s Law Center led a coalition of 60 health care, women’s, civil rights, and other groups, prompting the EEOC’s ruling, and making a real difference for women. A study conducted shortly after the ruling found that contraceptive coverage had increased across the nation. Yet some employers have resisted, and we continue to hear from far too many women who do not have coverage for the contraceptives they need.

Join us in telling the EEOC to focus on enforcing this important protection.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be hearing about our new campaign to make sure the new health care law also fulfills its promise of guaranteeing insurance coverage of contraceptives for all women regardless of employer coverage. Today, let’s honor this important anniversary by asking the EEOC to ensure that women receive the contraceptive coverage from their employers to which they are legally entitled.

Thank you for your continued commitment to health care that works for women and their families.

Sincerely,

Judy Waxman
Vice President for Health and Reproductive Rights
National Women’s Law Center

P.S. To review the long battle we’ve fought to get insurance coverage of contraception, check out our timeline.

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Help Us Protect Against New Attacks on HCR – Your Gift Matched

12/14/2010 Nativegrl77

You have to wonder — which part of the landmark health care law do they want to repeal?

Is it the part that ends the practice of charging women higher health insurance premiums than men?

Or perhaps it’s the part that bans the practice of denying coverage to rape victims because insurers consider rape and domestic violence to be “pre-existing conditions?”

This year’s landmark law was an urgent and long-overdue step forward. And we’re not going to let it fall victim to partisan politics.

With your help, we can defend our gains — and make new progress — for women and families in 2011.

Please make an urgent contribution to the Center’s year-end campaign — every dollar you donate will be matched dollar for dollar by our Board of Directors, up to a total of $60,000.

Last year, Congress considered ways to fix our broken health care system, and the Center went to work. We sought to stop insurers from charging women higher premiums than men. We sought to require insurers to provide insurance to 32 million Americans who had none. And we sought to end the trauma of women being denied coverage by insurance companies that consider Cesareans, domestic violence and rape to be “pre-existing conditions.”

We researched and documented the discrimination women face. We put women’s health needs front and center through our attention-grabbing “Being a Woman Is Not a Pre-existing Condition” campaign. We provided expert testimony on Capitol Hill documenting the inequities and discrimination that women faced every day as they sought quality health care for themselves and their families.

And with the help of so many people like you, we won.

The health care law was the culmination of years of work by the Center and its allies — documenting the abuses by insurance companies, organizing policy advocates, activating supporters, and building Congressional support Member by Member.

With your help, we will carry on the fight for women and families in America — in the workplace, in the classroom, on the soccer field, and in the doctor’s office.

And until December 31, every dollar you donate will be matched dollar for dollar by our Board of Directors, up to a total of $60,000.

On behalf of women and families everywhere, thank you for your generous help.

Sincerely,

Nancy Duff Campbell
Co-President
National Women’s Law Center

Marcia Greenberger
Co-President
National Women’s Law Center

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Don’t Believe the Hype about Today’s Court Ruling on the New Health Care Law

12/13/2010 Nativegrl77


	Help Spread the Word



	All we’ve got are the facts and you — 2 out of 3 judges have found the health care law constitutional. So why is the conservative media saying the law is at risk? Forward this email to your friends and help us fight the misinformation machine.

The headline should read, “2 out of 3 judges have found the new health care law constitutional,” but we have a feeling the conservative media machine has something else up its sleeve.

After being unable to stop the passage of the new health care law, opponents decided to try to challenge the law in court as unconstitutional. So far two courts have rejected these challenges — a Michigan court and another court in Virginia which found the law constitutional. However, today a judge in Virginia has handed down the first ruling that one piece of the law is unconstitutional. This judge has no greater authority than the other two but that is no matter to conservative media pundits, who have sounded the alarms for the death knell of the health care law.

We need your help to spread the word — forward this email to five of your friends today.

Millions of women across the country are already benefiting from the new health care law. Since September 23, insurance companies can no longer drop you when you become sick or deny health coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Also, when you enroll in a new health plan, you no longer have co-pays for recommended preventative health care services like mammograms and pap smears. And the law provides even more relief to women, like making it illegal to charge them more than men for insurance. But opponents of the new law just don’t care.

Make no mistake — the minimum coverage provision that was struck down in this one court is an important piece of the new law that will help ensure the success of the important insurance reforms that will end the harmful and discriminatory insurance practices that women have faced. While we are certainly disappointed in today’s ruling, it is not the final word. The conservative media machine shouldn’t use this one ruling — one of three — to undermine the health care law we’ve all worked so hard to pass.

Not so fast — we’ve got the facts. Help us spread the word that the sky is not falling, the insurance companies have not won, and the health care law is alive and well. Forward this email to five of your friends today.

Opponents of the law are not going to stop. We know that they will try to fight the law all the way to the Supreme Court. But we are confident that this important law is constitutional and will be fully implemented to the benefit of millions of women and families around the country.

Interested in the status of the legal challenges to the health care law? Check out this helpful chart from the Washington Post.

Sincerely,

Lisa Codispoti
Senior Counsel
National Women’s Law Center

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Elections and the New Health Care Law

11/03/2010 Nativegrl77

Yesterday was obviously a huge day in politics that will have a big impact on health care and other progressive issues. While it was certainly a dissappointing day, our collective job is to keep fighting to make sure the new law is fully implemented and fulfills its promise. I know people have lots of questions about the election and health care. For starters, below is a Huffington Post blog entry from HCAN‘s Ethan Rome on the federal elections.

In Soldarity,
Melinda Gibson

Boehner and the Republicans Didn’t Win a Majority to Deny Our Care

Here’s a crucial fact that should not be obscured by the ballyhoo surrounding the shift in control of the House: Most of the Republicans who won last night got a lower percentage at the ballot box than the percentage of Americans who support the new health care law‘s requirement that insurance companies cover people regardless of pre-existing medical conditions.

That’s why yesterday was hardly a repudiation of the health care law.

Furthermore, this election was clearly dominated by voter worries about the economy and jobs. Only 19 percent of voters named health care as their top concern, a distant second to the 61 percent most focused on the economy, according to CNN. There were winners and losers among both supporters and opponents of health reform. For example, more than half of the 34 Democrats who voted against the health care legislation still lost their races.

After a wildly toxic political debate over the issue, people are split over the larger question of “reform” and key components of the law enjoy overwhelming public support. Specifically, over the last several months, even as the public has been divided on reform, two-thirds of Americans have supported the outlawing of pre-existing condition exclusions (Anzalone Liszt Research poll conducted for the Herndon Alliance of 1,000 2010 likely voters, conducted April 19-25, 2010. Margin of error +/-3%). For example, while a recent New York Times/CBS poll showed the public split over on the new law, only one-quarter of repeal supporters stuck with their position when told repeal would mean that insurance companies would no longer be required to cover people with medical conditions or prior illnesses.

This is the reality even after a contentious political season marked by an unprecedented deluge of attack ads that spread one lie after another about health reform. In fact, opponents of the new law spent $108 million since March to advertise against it – six times more than supporters.

That’s something members of the new Republican majority will have to navigate as they square real-world legislative proposals on health care (if they have any) with their campaign rhetoric about repeal. They may try on Day One to repeal the health care law’s individual mandate, but they can’t do that without also throwing out the many new consumer protections, including the prohibition on insurers denying people care simply because they’re sick or ending lifetime limits on coverage. Both of those provisions are more popular with the American public than the Republicans are.

The Republicans also talk about de-funding the law, interfering with its implementation and holding endless oversight hearings to gratuitously harass Obama administration officials. That’s not progress, that’s pointless, cynical politics.

We all know that the law is not going to be repealed, so the debateisn’t going to be about what gets done–it will be about defining whose side members of Congress are on. For Republican repeal-mongers, that will be clear. They’re for the insurance companies and against consumers.

The Republicans want to protect the excessive profits of the insurance companies and the bloated salaries of company CEOs, no matter how badly that hurts America’s consumers. That’s what repeal means. It means rolling back the clock and letting the insurance companies deny people coverage due to pre-existing conditions and drop people’s coverage when they get sick. It means that small businesses will continue paying higher rates for health insurance than big corporations. It means repealing measures to cut down waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare. It means opposing much-needed relief in prescription drug costs for seniors. That’s the Republican repeal agenda – the insurance companies get the profits and we get the shaft.

The American people don’t want to give our health care back to the insurance companies. Repeal would cause real harm to real people. That may not matter to the Republican majority, but it matters a great deal to the people they now represent.