Womenstake

An Unstable Health Care System: A Girl's Best Friend?

by Thao Nguyen, Outreach Manger, 
National Women's Law Center 

Yesterday I had one of those weird phone calls. The kind where, as soon as you get off the phone, you immediately go through your contact list looking for someone you can tell about it. The kind that makes you stop that downstairs neighbor you haven’t spoken to in three years and recount the story to her. The kind that inspires you to drop everything and write a post for your organization’s blog. On a Sunday night.
 
The call was from my friend, Lucy.* She was calling to tell me that she and her boyfriend of 10 years recently got married.

Okay, I suppose since you don’t know them this might not be mind-blowing to you. But Lucy and her beau, Dan,* had one of those painful relationships where the woman was hinting, making banners, and going just short of taking a full-page out in The New York Times to beg her boyfriend to propose to her — and he just couldn’t seem to get around to it. But Lucy, who works with bankers and lawyers for a living, has the patience of a saint.

And so 10 years have come and gone. Which makes today, for all the friends who have been rooting for her (and who may or may not have been condemning her boyfriend for his lack of action), a momentous time that rivals the recent replacing of judges. (Yeah – I was shocked by the Ellen announcement too.) 
 
So when I heard that the wedding, this miracle of all miracles, had actually taken place, I made some popcorn, got a glass of wine, and snuggled up on the sofa, expecting a long story about how Dan finally came to his senses. Only to have Lucy matter-of-factly tell me, “I don’t have a job anymore and the COBRA was too expensive. No health insurance, so marriage.”

Young, Brilliant, and Baffled by Health Insurance

by Lauren Hunter, Outreach Intern, 
National Women’s Law Center 

This post is part of a series about young adults and health care reform. 

Last week, I was talking on the phone with a good friend from high school, Sara, about the monumental changes in her life. She just returned from a semester in Spain, has been preparing to move into an apartment with her boyfriend and is contemplating life after college graduation. The latter – one component in particular – was inducing panic.

“After I graduate, my parents’ health insurance won’t cover me. When I mentioned to a friend who graduated a few years ago that I was hoping to get a job with health benefits, she laughed at me! I have no idea how to buy health insurance on my own or what kind I need or whether I can afford it.”

Her sense of impending doom resonated with me and highlighted the absurdity of our current system. Sara is an intelligent, organized, competent 21-year-old. She has supported herself financially for three years, rented an apartment for one, studied in a foreign country for six months and will graduate from college a semester early with a killer GPA. 

Yet the thought of attaining health insurance terrifies her.

And Sara is not alone. Many young adults have struggled to access and understand convoluted health insurance policies. Many young adults have faced or are close to someone who has faced unaffordable premiums or out-of-pocket costs. And many young adults have thought about forgoing health insurance. In fact, 27.5 percent of Americans ages 18-24 lack health insurance – the highest rate in all age groups. 

Gender disparities in health care make the situation worse for young women. Due to the practice of gender rating, many health insurance plans are unaffordable: the National Women’s Law Center discovered that 25-year-old women have been charged up to 45 percent more than 25-year-old men for the same exact insurance plans. In addition, many plans don’t offer adequate coverage of reproductive health services, such as prescription contraceptives. Since the average American woman is trying to avoid or postpone pregnancy during more than 22 years of her life, affordable health coverage that includes reproductive health care is crucial to her well-being.

Policymakers must not ignore the youth – young women in particular – when they reform our broken health care system. Obtaining health insurance must be simple, affordable, and appealing for the young and healthy, as well as for everyone else.

Young Voices in Health Care Reform

by Lauren Hunter, Outreach Intern, 
National Women’s Law Center

This post is part of a series about young adults and health care reform.

Over the next several weeks I will be blogging about young adults and health – what we think about our health, the different areas of health that are relevant to us, the cultural components that influence our health statuses, etc. I intend to consider gender disparities: how, as young people, we already begin to experience differences in care due to our genders.

My plan was for this first blog to discuss the summer's hot topic – health insurance – and the difficulty of attaining and understanding it as a young person. While browsing for relevant articles a few days ago, I noticed the second most-emailed article in the New York Times: "My Brief Life as a Woman" by (male author) Dana Jennings.  Unable to resist, I read Jennings’ account of undergoing hormone therapy for prostate cancer. I instantly realized that health insurance would have to wait (please don’t follow my example, Congress).

Jennings describes the changes he suffered as a result of taking a testosterone-suppressing hormone. He had the honor of experiencing hot flashes, cravings for unhealthy foods, weight gain, and frequent and unexpected episodes of crying.

After taking us through his overwhelming experience, Jennings states: “the world of women is hormonal and mysterious . . . we men don’t have the semblance of a clue.” With this sentence, what had been a humorous depiction of an unusual situation became an illustration of a prominent cultural understanding of sex difference.

Women’s behavior, Jennings infers, is influenced by their hormones. He surely understands – intellectually – that men’s behavior is similarly influenced by hormones. In fact, Jennings experience was due to the suppression of the hormone testosterone. Yet, he describes only women as “hormonal.”