By Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who represents Florida’s 20th Congressional district
Women’s History Month is a time for celebrating the brave and inspirational role models who have come before us – who, through their shining example, paved the way to a better future. They struggled and suffered quietly, tirelessly, on the quest for suffrage and access to education. They picketed for equal pay and against civil rights abuses. They proclaimed their dignity, their humanity, and their ownership of their own bodies. And despite challenges, never despaired that the days and years to come might bring a time when women in our great nation no longer felt the pains of discrimination.
I believe that the next great step in this slow and steady march toward equality lies in health care fairness for women, now guaranteed through the Affordable Care Act. This game-changing health care law, passed by Congress and signed by the President two years ago, marks a historic shift in the way women are treated in our country.
This month we learned that women still pay up to 50 percent more than men do for identical insurance. This is a function of a highly discriminatory practice called “gender rating” that results in insurance companies charging women more, based on an assumption in the industry that women seek health care services more frequently than men, or simply because they can get pregnant. The Affordable Care Act boldly outlaws this egregious practice forever, while providing important preventive measures like contraceptives and mammograms free of co-pays and deductibles, and putting a stop to discrimination based on pre-existing medical conditions.
In short, the Affordable Care Act – beyond helping 31 million uninsured Americans afford comprehensive coverage, closing the Medicare prescription drug donut hole, protecting the doctor-patient relationship, and bringing down the deficit – is a monumental piece of women’s rights law. This legislation, aimed at fixing our nation’s broken health care insurance system, has fundamentally made this country a more perfect union.
We cannot allow these tremendous gains to fall by the wayside of history, if for nothing more than the insurmountable leaps backward that repealing the Affordable Care Act would mean for American women.
Without the Affordable Care Act, we would go back to a time when a young woman like my constituent Chastity Hart, a 20-year-old with lupus, would not be eligible to remain on her parents’ insurance. And because of her pre-existing condition, she would have difficulty getting her own insurance, if she could at all.
Without the Affordable Care Act, we would go back to a time when a small business owner like Maria Antonietta Diaz, the CEO of a 21-person company in Pembroke Pines, would not be eligible for tax breaks to provide her employees with health insurance and as a result, a health care safety net.
And without the Affordable Care Act, we would go back to a time when America’s 2.5 million breast cancer survivors – women like me - are just one job loss away from losing health insurance coverage because of their pre-existing condition.
Three years ago, I announced my own personal battle with breast cancer. Like so many other women, I always knew it was a possibility, but I never thought it would be me. Just weeks after a clean mammogram and my forty-first birthday, I heard those devastating words: “You have cancer.”
There have been so many advances in screening and treatment of cancer – but all of that is moot if women are not learning about their bodies, taking steps to reduce risk factors, and getting regular and appropriate screenings. And that is why, as soon as I was cancer free, I introduced the Breast Health Education and Awareness Requires Learning Young Act, or the EARLY Act.
The EARLY Act focuses on a central tenet: that we must empower young women to understand their bodies and speak up for their health. I am grateful we were able to pass this legislation to help so many other women, so that our daughters, sisters, friends and neighbors have more confidence in their future.
In the three years since my battle with breast cancer, countless women have approached me to talk about their own personal health care struggles. There are women who have foregone their annual mammograms because they could not afford the exam. I have heard from women who have had to choose between surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, despite a physician’s recommendation for multiple treatments, because the cost was simply too great to bear. And there are those women who avoid a diagnosis, despite discovering what they feel could be cancer, because of the very real fear that an insurance company might rescind their coverage.
The Affordable Care Act makes these fears a thing of the past. The law limits health disparities and stresses prevention by eliminating cost-sharing for routine tests and wellness visits; it abolishes annual and lifetime caps on what an insurance policy will pay; it requires insurers to spend much more of your premium dollars on your actual health care; and it ends the insurance industry’s discrimination against women.
The Affordable Care Act fulfills the promise of equality for women, recognizing that our health is important, our well-being is important, and that we should never be treated as second-class citizens by our insurers or the government because of our gender. Two years after the Affordable Care Act became law, we are firmly on that path toward health care equality, and we have so much to celebrate. Not only are we transforming our nation’s sick-care system into a health and wellness system, but we are ensuring that health care discrimination will become a thing of the past. This is what Women’s History Month is all about - celebrating the milestones of our nation’s history that have moved us closer to closing the equality gap.
