Over the years I’ve worked with some leaders/employees who suggested, some more strongly, that we base employment related decisions such as hiring, promotion, benefits, terminations, etc. on an employee’s health. One such manager who had fortunately always been healthy and hadn’t been impacted by access to health care and hadn’t faced issues with cost proposed that “sick” employees pay more of the health care premiums. Some of these “sick” people were simply pregnant. A few months after we moved ahead with our benefits plans without incorporating his recommended changes, he was involved in a serious accident. He returned to me and apologized for not understanding how an accident could impact his life in so many ways. He was grateful for his insurance and certainly did not expect to pay more due to anticipated long-term care for his injuries. Sometimes it takes an experience to change a person’s perception and you’ve done a great job of giving real life examples to impress upon us all how health insurance or lack thereof can impact our lives and the lives of our loved ones.

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been pasting blog posts from NWLC staff about how they are affected by the health care law like this one and this one.  Stay tuned for more posts from our staff about their personal stories about what the health care law means to them.  You can add your personal story by joining our story blog here.

Cross-posted from WomenStake

Let me go back a little. I should start by saying that like many other Asian cultures, the Vietnamese use the Gregorian or Western calendar for our day-to-day activities, but still celebrate our New Year’s according to the lunar calendar. The Vietnamese New Year, our biggest holiday, is called Tet and follows the Asian zodiac, which means each year is associated with a different animal with a total of 12 animal years.

So for many Asian people, this week, not three weeks ago, starts our new year. And this year is like no other year – it’s the year of luck and fortune, also known as the year of the dragon. It’s believed that major events taking place during the year of the dragon are lucky. And a major event that people commonly aim for is having a baby. This weekend, as I celebrated New Year’s eve with my fiancé at our favorite Chinese restaurant in the DC area (also former President George H. Bush’s favorite Chinese restaurant – probably the only thing I’ll ever have in common with him), we talked endlessly about how to set a wedding date in the midst of an oncoming baby boom. Every person I know (most importantly my sisters) are either pregnant or trying to get pregnant and would have trouble traveling to our wedding.

However, our conversation quickly veered from our wedding to why I thought mothers of dragon babies would be particularly lucky:

• Most employers are required to allow women reasonable breaks and a location to pump breast milk.
• Starting in August, breastfeeding expenses will be covered in most plans without a co-pay.
• And most significantly, no dragon baby this year will ever have to think about whether a pre-existing condition will affect their ability to get health coverage. Currently, children under 19 cannot be denied health coverage due to a pre-existing condition.

And by the time these children turn two years old, they will never know of the day when a person can be denied of health coverage due to a pre-existing condition.

Okay – it’s not luck – it’s thanks to the health care law.

For the many of us who fought hard for this law, it’s for people like the baby dragons coming this year (and the baby rabbits of last year, and the baby tigers of the year before). Knowing that we will have a boon of American babies – tiny dragons who can dream just a bit bigger because they will not be tethered to a job they don’t enjoy or can pursue a business they dreamt up in their basement even though they were born with asthma / diabetes / (fill the blank with an illness) is one of the most exciting things about the coming year. So let the baby boon come – and other exciting things (like getting married) can wait for the year of the snake.

Cross-posted from WomenStake.

Recently, a former Senator said that people with pre-existing conditions should pay more for their health insurance – citing an example from his own life of having a daughter with a pre-existing condition and expecting to have to pay more for his family’s health coverage as a result). Later, he elaborated on this point by telling a mother whose son survived cancer that people with pre-existing conditions should pay more for health care coverage because they make poor health care choices (though he did qualify this point by saying that, in this case, it wasn’t really the young man’s fault that he got cancer when he was five years old).

If he had read our blog, he’d realize a few things about why the provisions in the health care law that end denials of pre-existing conditions and limits rating of premiums are important:

1. Having a pre-existing condition will make it very difficult, if not impossible, for some people to get health coverage: A couple of years ago, my doctors thought that I had a brain aneurysm. During this scary time in my life, I became worried that having the surgery would not only put me in medical debt, but would make me uninsurable in the future. Why did I think this? Because the insurance industry really cares about their bottom line and not my health as shown by blog posts I wrote like this one.  So let’s forget about costs for some people – even finding health coverage is completely impossible.
2. Many health events in our life have nothing to do with “poor health choices:” My mom, who had a bout of yellow fever as a teenager, is a prime example of this. I hardly can imagine that the fact that she lived in an area with more mosquitoes can be considered a “poor health decision.” However, her past illness meant that when her job cut back on her benefits, she couldn’t find anyone who would insure her because of this pre-existing condition. (We won’t go into the fact that simply being a woman made her considered a “pre-existing condition” and if she could find health care, it would be more expensive and not cover all her needs.)
3. Getting rid of the health care law and giving control back to insurance companies is, well, stupid: When my dad was first diagnosed with dementia, he constantly feared that our home would be taken away because of the costs of  specialists and medicine. Why? Because millions of Americans have lost their homes because of medical debt.

Trust me; I know I have extraordinary parents, but the health care issues they faced are far from that. The reason why the provisions to end denials of coverage due to pre-existing conditions, charge more to patients who get sick or injured, and ending the days when insurance companies can drop people for getting sick are so popular is because many people know families, friends and  loved ones in the same place as my parents who are struggling to keep the coverage they can get, when they can get it.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more stories, and more blog posts from our staff about how they will benefit from the health care law. We hope you will continue to share your stories about why the health care law is important for you and your loved ones.

Also, because as cliché as it sounds, our youth is our future (I told you it was cheesy and cliché). They are our future entrepreneurs, artists, and underpaid (but very satisfied) non-profit employees working to make this country, this world, a better place. I know because I’m a proud member of this idealistic club.

Right after college, I got a job with a small non-profit that was lucky it could provide me with a computer, forget about health insurance. As someone who grew up with a mother who worked two jobs because our family needed health coverage (running her small business and a part-time job at a local store in order to assure our family had health insurance) I knew that benefits were no small luxury. But I didn’t like my choices: quit the job I loved and find something that included health benefits or cross my fingers and hope nothing went wrong with my health.

So as a young person, I went with the not medically recommended route of crossing my fingers. I skipped needed health visits altogether. Bad cold? More orange juice. Odd pain in my side? Walk it off. The only time I ever saw a doctor was a yearly trip to Planned Parenthood to receive my annual exam. I had to save for months before I was able to afford a plan with health insurance plan I found online – and to be honest, I couldn’t even afford the deductible (we’ll save the fact that I was paying more for this individual health insurance plan simply because I was a woman for another blog post).

I’m glad that I can say – thanks to the health care law – stories like mine will soon be ancient history. My baby sister is 23 years old and opted to work for a small non-profit right out of college, like me. Due to our struggling economy, her non-profit decided to forgo all benefits for their staff. The difference is that she, and many of her co-workers who are young, recent graduates, can go on their parents’ health insurance plan as dependents. They can continue to work on their wonderful dream of being very satisfied (underpaid) non-profit employees working for a better country, a better world without having to compromise their health and their peace of mind. All this thanks to one of the provisions in the health care law.

Cross-post from WomenStake

Forty years ago today, for the first time in its history, the Supreme Court held that a law that discriminated against women violated the Constitution. In Reed v. Reed, a unanimous Court struck down an Idaho law requiring the automatic preference of a man over a woman when both applied to be the executor of an estate. The Court recognized that women had a constitutional right to equal protection of the law, turning from a long list of previous rulings that allowed women to be excluded from juries, or the legal profession, or even bartending, on the grounds that women needed to be protected from the rough-and-tumble of the workplace or the public square, or confined to the sphere of hearth and home. The Court’s ruling was spurred by the advocacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who authored Sally Reed’s Supreme Court brief and whose efforts in that case and in a series of groundbreaking Supreme Court cases in the years that followed established constitutional protection against discrimination on the basis of sex. Forty years ago today, the Supreme Court’s decision also gave new constitutional underpinnings to the statutory protections against sex discrimination in employment and an impetus and strength to an array of new statutory protections against discrimination in education, credit, and housing, as well as employment, in the years that followed. That work continues. Most recently, there is a new protection against sex discrimination in federally-funded health care, as part of the Affordable Care Act, closing yet one more gap in legal protection against discrimination women are still fighting to secure.

But let there be no mistake about it, while cause for celebration, these gains are not fixed in stone. In the last few decades since the Reed decision, none of the constitutional cases protecting women against official sex discrimination were decided without dissent. Indeed, just last year Justice Scalia flatly stated, “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.” And last month, in an interview with Newsweek, Judge Bork, when asked whether he still believes that the Equal Protection Clause does not protect against sex discrimination, answered that he did, and felt justified in that belief because “women are a majority of the population now—a majority in university classrooms and a majority in all kinds of contexts. It seems to me silly to say, ‘Gee, they’re discriminated against and we need to do something about it.’ They aren’t discriminated against anymore.”

The Court’s most recent decision in a constitutional sex discrimination case proves that these protections cannot be taken for granted. This June, the Supreme Court split 4 – 4 in Flores-Villar v. United States, a case challenging a law that has different standards for an unmarried woman than an unmarried man to pass on her U.S. citizenship to a child. (Justice Kagan had worked on the case previously and so did not participate in the decision.) The tie decision had the effect of affirming the constitutionality of this blatantly discriminatory law and its unequal treatment of mothers and fathers.

While today those fighting sex discrimination have the law on our side, as the Flores-Villar case and the comments by Justice Scalia and Judge Bork remind us, important gains like those in Reed must always be defended and safeguarded. It is our job to make sure that we continue to move forward, building on the law’s promise to stand behind the effort to continue to expand the possibilities for women and girls.

Cross-posted from WomenStake

• NO MORE RESCISSIONS: Insurance companies are prohibited from dropping your coverage if you become sick.
• NO MORE LIFETIME LIMITS: Insurance companies are prohibited from limiting the amount of money they will pay for your benefits over your lifetime.
• NO MORE ANNUAL CAPS: Insurance companies are prohibited from limiting the amount of money they will pay for benefits during one year. During 2011, annual limits cannot be lower than $750,000 & are completely prohibited by 2014.
• NO MORE DOCTOR’S NOTE TO VISIT THE OB-GYN: The new health care law allows women to have “direct access” to this type of health care. Insurance companies are prohibited from requiring women to get referrals from their doctor for obstetrical & gynecological care.

Improved access to affordable preventive care.

All new health plans are required to cover key preventive health services for women at no additional cost, such as co-payments or deductibles.

Preventive services that many plans started providing women and girls, starting January 1, 2011:

• Mammograms every 1-2 years for women over 40
• Cervical cancer screening
• Smoking & alcohol cessation programs for adults
• A wide range of prenatal screenings & tests
• Diabetes & blood pressure screening & counseling
• Depression screening for teens & adults.

Added to this list are the newly announced preventive services for women, starting on August 1, 2012, including:

• All FDA-approved contraception
• Well-woman visits
• Lactation consultation & supplies
• Screening & counseling for interpersonal & domestic violence
• Screening for gestational diabetes
• DNA co-testing for HPV
• Counseling regarding sexually transmitted infections, including HIV
• Screening for HIV

Senior women have more affordable access to the services they need:

• Medicare now covers more preventive benefits such as no-cost annual checkups and mammograms.
• The Medicare Part D “donut hole” closing. Last year, seniors in the donut hole, or the prescription drug coverage gap that requires seniors to pay the entire cost of prescriptions while in the gap, received rebate checks; this year, they will receive 50% discounts on brand name drugs.

It is now easier for children & young adults to get & keep health insurance.

• Young adults can remain on their parents’ health insurance policy until age 26.
• Health plans are prohibited from denying coverage to children (aged 19 & under) with “pre-existing conditions” such as asthma or diabetes.

Additional important provisions for women that are in place:

• A new tax credit that helps small businesses provide coverage to their employees. Women are more likely than men to work for small businesses that don’t offer health insurance.
• A requirement that employers with more than 50 employees provide women a reasonable time and place to express breast milk.
• Access to a new pre-existing condition insurance plan – or “high-risk pool” – that is available to women who are uninsured due to a preexisting condition until 2014, when insurance companies will no longer be able to deny women coverage due to pre-existing conditions.

This is just the beginning. In 2014:

• Insurance companies will no longer be able to deny women coverage due to pre-existing conditions, such as having had a C-section, breast or cervical cancer, or received medical treatment for domestic or sexual violence.
• Insurers must end the practice of charging women more for health insurance than they charge men.
• Approximately 10.3 million uninsured women will gain health coverage from expanded Medicaid eligibility.
• Up to 7 million women who lack affordable insurance through an employer will be eligible for subsidies to help pay for health coverage.
• A new competitive marketplace will be available for women and their families to compare & shop for new health plans.

This blog is part of the #HERvotes blog carnival.

Yesterday, the Senate confirmed six judicial nominees, four of whom were women: Nannette Jolivette Brown to the Eastern District of Louisiana, Nancy Torresen to the District of Maine, Marina Garcia Marmolejo to the Southern District of Texas, and Jennifer Guerin Zipps to the District of Arizona. Not only did the confirmation of these women bring the total number of women confirmed to the federal bench during the Obama Administration to 50 (47% of all confirmed nominees), but two of these nominees broke glass ceilings in their jurisdictions – Judge Brown will be the first African-American woman on the Eastern District of Louisiana, and Judge Torreson will be the first woman to sit on the district court of Maine.

These confirmations are cause for celebration. As others have noted, President Obama’s judicial nominees have been remarkable for the diversity that they would add to the federal bench on the grounds of gender, race and ethnicity, and sexual orientation. And many of President Obama’s nominees, once confirmed, have broken barriers on the courts on which they now sit, at all levels of the federal judiciary: for example, Justice Sonia Sotomayor is the first Latina to sit on the Supreme Court; Judge Susan Carney is the first woman to sit on the Second Circuit from Connecticut; Judge Jacqueline Nguyen became the first Vietnamese woman to sit on any federal court in the country when she was confirmed to the Central District of California, and she hopefully will become the first Asian-American woman confirmed to a federal court of appeals.

But in addition to firsts, it’s important to have seconds, and thirds, until the day when it’s accepted that when litigants walk into a courtroom, the judge may just as easily be a woman, as a man. When almost half of law students are women, it is more important than ever that women be fairly represented in the federal judiciary. Furthermore, the increased presence of women on the bench improves the quality of justice: women judges can enrich courts’ understanding of how best to realize the intended purpose and effect of the law that the courts are charged with applying. For example, one study demonstrated that male federal appellate court judges are less likely to rule against plaintiffs bringing claims of sex discrimination, if a female judge is on the panel. And studies outside the judicial context strongly suggest that women are able to have a greater impact when their representation in a group moves beyond one or two token individuals. Here as well, President Obama’s nominees have made a difference, with Justice Kagan bringing the number of women sitting on the Supreme Court to three for the first time in 221 years. In addition, the number of women on the First, Second, Fourth, Sixth, Eleventh and Federal Circuits, as well as on a number of district courts, have increased during this Administration.

When our federal courts are diverse, they are more reflective of the diverse population of this nation. When our courts are diverse, people around the country may have more confidence that the court understands the real-world implications of its rulings. We congratulate the women who were confirmed today, and look forward to congratulating many more.

Cross-posted from WomenStake

The Census Bureau just released new data on poverty in the U.S. in 2010.  Though 2010 marked the first full year of the recovery that began when the recession officially ended in June 2009, the number of Americans living in poverty increased last year: the overall poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009. Unfortunately, the numbers aren’t looking any better for women and families:

• Poverty among women – already much higher than poverty among men – climbed to 14.5 percent in 2010, the highest rate in 17 years. A 14.5 percent poverty rate means 17.2 million women were living in poverty in 2010, about 800,000 more than in 2009 (when the women’s poverty rate was 13.9 percent).
• Nearly 44 percent of poor women (7.5 million) lived in extreme poverty last year, with incomes less than half of the federal poverty level. The extreme poverty rate among women rose from 5.9 percent in 2009 to 6.3 percent in 2010, the highest rate since the Census Bureau began recording this figure 22 years ago.
• Poverty rates in 2010 were even higher for women of color – 25.6 percent for black women (up from 24.6 percent in 2009), and 25.0 percent for Hispanic women (up from 23.8 percent in 2009).
• But wait, it gets worse: the poverty rate for single moms rose from 38.5 percent in 2009 to 40.7 percent in 2010.
• The child poverty rate – already very high at 20.7 percent in 2009 – jumped to 22.0 percent last year, meaning more than one in five children was living in poverty. More than half of poor children lived in female-headed families in 2010.

More to come as we continue to analyze the new Census data. And check out NWLC’s upcoming posts to find out what happened to health insurance coverage and the wage gap.

Cross-posted from WomenStake

If you’ve been reading our blog, you’ve probably heard how excited we are about releasing the 2010 edition of Making the Grade on Women’s Health: A National and State-by-State Report Card. Hopefully, we’ve sparked your curiosity and you’re wondering what the Report Card’s findings are. While the Report Card shows that the nation has a long way to go in improving women’s health, it also gives you a look at a better future under the new health care law.

The Report Card shows that the nation is still far from reaching important women’s health goals, and earns an overall grade of “Unsatisfactory.” The grading is based on 26 indicators of health status that measure things such as the percentage of women receiving health screenings like mammograms, incidences of diseases and conditions such as high blood pressure, and measures of community health such as poverty rates. The country only receives a “Satisfactory” grade for 3 of those indicators—the percentage of women age 40 and older getting mammograms regularly, the percentage of women visiting the dentist annually, and the percentage of women age 50 and older who receive screenings for colorectal cancer—and receives a “Failing” grade for 13!

Individual states also have considerable room for improvement. In no state do women enjoy overall satisfactory health status, and only two receive the next highest grade of “Satisfactory minus” (Vermont and Massachusetts). The majority of states receive an “Unsatisfactory” grade, and nearly a quarter of all states receive a “Failing” grade.

The report card also looks at state policies that impact women’s health. While states have made some progress in adopting policies to advance women’s health, such as requiring insurance plans to cover essential health screenings and providing Medicaid coverage for smoking cessation, progress has slowed considerably and most states are far from reaching important policy goals. Of the 68 policies examined, only 17 are met by a majority of the states. The average number of policy indicators met across all states was just 25.

While the findings show that the nation and the states continue to fall short of meeting women’s health needs, there is reason to be hopeful. The new health care law, The Affordable Care Act , will lead to major improvements in many of the areas examined in the Report Card. Check out the full report  to find out how your state fared and how the ACA will improve women’s health and well being.

On Thursday, we’ll be releasing the 2010 edition of Making the Grade on Women’s Health: A National and State-by-State Report Card, the fifth women’s health report card in a decade-long series assessing the overall health of women at the national and state levels.

When NWLC and its partners launched the Report Card project to evaluate the state of women’s health across the country, it was in part as a response to the failure to pass comprehensive health care reform in the mid-90s. With a grim outlook for health care progress at the federal level, we needed a tool that would help advocates, researchers, and policymakers push for improvements in women’s health at the state level (while continuing to promote national change). The Report Card is that tool — it grades each state and the nation on a set of health status indicators and evaluates state progress (or decline) in adopting laws and policies that support women’s health.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a mix of improvement and deterioration on the issues our Report Card examines; the overall message of each edition has been consistent — the nation and the states must do so much more to support women’s health. What is so exciting about the 2010 Report Card is that it includes a special feature on a monumental development that is sure to lead to major improvements in women’s health and well-being — our new health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). There are still huge gains to be made but as we look toward the future of women’s health, we know that the ACA will be seen as a turning point in women’s health and well-being across the country.

Check back later this week, as we’ll be sharing more insights on changes in women’s health in the past ten years; how the ACA will continue to improve women’s health; what the recent release of Healthy People 2020 (which establishes a new framework and goals for national health) means for women’s health; which states have been the most (and least) successful in supporting women’s health; and many others.

Also, register for our Making the Grade on Women’s Health webinar, taking place Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 1:00 PM EST to learn more about the findings in our report.